Depeche Mode Just Can't Get Enough / Enjoy The Silence: 20 Years Of Depeche Mode Album (Uncut, 2001)
- Thread starter demoderus
- Start date
Dave Gahan can't breathe. He can also hear nothing. Which is a little odd because there are 50,000 Depeche Mode fans just yards away, screaming for him to drag himself back onstage for an encore. His bandmates are beckoning him back, but Dave is pinned to the spot with chest pains. His senses are swimming. His legs begin to buckle.
It's October 8, 1993, in New Orleans. Band relations are already at breaking point on the Mode's longest, wildest and most self-destructive tour ever. Everyone is either stoned, wired or suicidally depressed. Nobody's talking to Dave, though they call him four-letter names behind his back. The singer is now emaciated, a ragged totem pole of tattoos and self-inflicted scars. On stage tonight, he has swaggered and hip-thrusted like Michael Hutchence's junkie-god soul brother. Can he possibly get any more rock 'n' roll than that?
Well, sure. How about dying at the climax of a show after a drug-induced heart attack? Cool? But damn, here come the paramedics. And now Gahan is being stretchered off, too wasted to notice, too fucked to care. As he's loaded into the ambulance, he hers his fellow Mode members hesitantly spark up their improvised encore. It's a cheery tune called "Death's Door". Grimly appropriate. Dave starts to laugh.
"Death was the furthest thing from my mind, to be honest," recalls Gahan today. "I was in so much denial about what was really going on."
By the time he collapses in New Orleans, Dave Gahan has been punishing himself with heroin and cocaine, liquor and dope, Ecstasy and agony, guilt and sin for almost a decade. In deference to the minor cardiac arrest he has just suffered, he will be allowed one day off. And then he will start all over again on his headlong rush towards death or glory.
January 2001, the surviving trio at the heart of Depeche Mode are gathered at a west London studio. Five or six years ago, this in itself would have been a miracle. The fact that Dave Gahan, Martin Gore and Andy 'Fletch' Fletcher are joking and vibing and grooving on their new album, Exciter, is more amazing still considering how their last two records destroyed their friendships, split the band and almost killed them.
Also present is the album's producer Mark Bell, of LFO and Bjork fame, finally consummating the Mode's long but often strained relationship with left-field electronica. In the past, they've been aligned with techno, industrial, house, goth, punk and synth-pop. Fashions fade, labels recycle. From stridently uncool outsiders to self-made survivors, Depeche Mode have outlasted them all.
Fletch, the Mode's non-musician and emotional anchor, blasts the album through the studio speakers in its near-complete entirety. Forget the journalistic hyperbole which greets major new releases - Exciter sounds majestic, full-bodied and diverse. It hangs together like modern architecture, a sumptuous amalgam of sleek technology with organic textures. Gahan's vocals are his most tender and expressive yet, especially on a brace of cooing techno-folk lullabies. This is either their most Depeche Mode album yet, or their least.
Uncut are here to discover how the Mode came to make Exciter, their first real post-drugs and post-trauma album. Because this is a saga of epic insecurity and chemical insanity: a farcical soap opera every bit as dark and druggy as the Stones at their Seventies peak, or as jaw-droppingly debauched as Led Zeppelin in their planet-shagging prime. And yet it features three men who, on first impressions, seem more at home browsing around garden centres than snorting, shagging and shooting up. Because this is the story of how three or four of the most introverted, vulnerable, unlikely pop stars in history conquered the rock universe.
And it all comes back to Basildon. To school days and teenage cliques and the bruising brutality of growing up strange in a strange town. You can take the boys out of Essex, but you can't quite take Basildon out of the boys. Because Depeche Mode are the original new-town neurotics. This genteel, semi-rural community where they all grew up began life as an urban-planned overspill Utopia, but by the late Seventies its concrete walkways and brutalist precincts began to take on Clockwork Orange overtones.
It's October 8, 1993, in New Orleans. Band relations are already at breaking point on the Mode's longest, wildest and most self-destructive tour ever. Everyone is either stoned, wired or suicidally depressed. Nobody's talking to Dave, though they call him four-letter names behind his back. The singer is now emaciated, a ragged totem pole of tattoos and self-inflicted scars. On stage tonight, he has swaggered and hip-thrusted like Michael Hutchence's junkie-god soul brother. Can he possibly get any more rock 'n' roll than that?
Well, sure. How about dying at the climax of a show after a drug-induced heart attack? Cool? But damn, here come the paramedics. And now Gahan is being stretchered off, too wasted to notice, too fucked to care. As he's loaded into the ambulance, he hers his fellow Mode members hesitantly spark up their improvised encore. It's a cheery tune called "Death's Door". Grimly appropriate. Dave starts to laugh.
"Death was the furthest thing from my mind, to be honest," recalls Gahan today. "I was in so much denial about what was really going on."
By the time he collapses in New Orleans, Dave Gahan has been punishing himself with heroin and cocaine, liquor and dope, Ecstasy and agony, guilt and sin for almost a decade. In deference to the minor cardiac arrest he has just suffered, he will be allowed one day off. And then he will start all over again on his headlong rush towards death or glory.
January 2001, the surviving trio at the heart of Depeche Mode are gathered at a west London studio. Five or six years ago, this in itself would have been a miracle. The fact that Dave Gahan, Martin Gore and Andy 'Fletch' Fletcher are joking and vibing and grooving on their new album, Exciter, is more amazing still considering how their last two records destroyed their friendships, split the band and almost killed them.
Also present is the album's producer Mark Bell, of LFO and Bjork fame, finally consummating the Mode's long but often strained relationship with left-field electronica. In the past, they've been aligned with techno, industrial, house, goth, punk and synth-pop. Fashions fade, labels recycle. From stridently uncool outsiders to self-made survivors, Depeche Mode have outlasted them all.
Fletch, the Mode's non-musician and emotional anchor, blasts the album through the studio speakers in its near-complete entirety. Forget the journalistic hyperbole which greets major new releases - Exciter sounds majestic, full-bodied and diverse. It hangs together like modern architecture, a sumptuous amalgam of sleek technology with organic textures. Gahan's vocals are his most tender and expressive yet, especially on a brace of cooing techno-folk lullabies. This is either their most Depeche Mode album yet, or their least.
Uncut are here to discover how the Mode came to make Exciter, their first real post-drugs and post-trauma album. Because this is a saga of epic insecurity and chemical insanity: a farcical soap opera every bit as dark and druggy as the Stones at their Seventies peak, or as jaw-droppingly debauched as Led Zeppelin in their planet-shagging prime. And yet it features three men who, on first impressions, seem more at home browsing around garden centres than snorting, shagging and shooting up. Because this is the story of how three or four of the most introverted, vulnerable, unlikely pop stars in history conquered the rock universe.
And it all comes back to Basildon. To school days and teenage cliques and the bruising brutality of growing up strange in a strange town. You can take the boys out of Essex, but you can't quite take Basildon out of the boys. Because Depeche Mode are the original new-town neurotics. This genteel, semi-rural community where they all grew up began life as an urban-planned overspill Utopia, but by the late Seventies its concrete walkways and brutalist precincts began to take on Clockwork Orange overtones.
"It was a job for a house," recalls Fletch, whose family moved to Basildon from Nottingham. Lanky and laconic, the 39-year-old has an easy, diplomatic demeanour and an accent smoothed into classless Estuary English, the lingua franca of the music business. As he chats about football and his small community restaurant in north London, Fletch could easily be a slightly rakish accountant or a market stallholder made good. Hard to imagine him as the Mode's chief depressive and flashpoint for group friction, but still waters run deep.
"If you could get a job, you could get a house," Fletch continues. "But in the Seventies it started to go wrong - the town expanded quickly, there were no jobs left. When I was growing up we had fields, football, cricket, countryside - but then it all went wrong economically. It's now a huge town with not many jobs, and young people with nothing to do."
Martin Gore, also 39, initially seems more wary than his schoolyard friend Fletch. Our first encounter feels rather like a job interview, with Gore the nervy candidate for a junior clerical position. But he is quick to laugh at himself, scrupulously polite and forthcoming. Later during a follow-up phone chat which overruns by half an hour, he will apologise profusely for being called away to take his wife to the gym. Not many millionaire pop stars are this civil.
"I really hated Basildon," nods the elfin songwriter in his wistful, Ron Manager accent - ah yes, leather boys in the park, cock rings for goalposts. "I wanted to get out as quickly as I could. I think being in a band was an escape. There was very little to do. It's one of those places where you go drinking because that's your only option. I hear it's a pretty horrible place these days."
The threat of violence was ever-present during Gore's teens. "When I was about 17 or 18, me and my friend were walking back from a party in Laindon, which is close to Basildon," he says, "and we heard this running behind us. We didn't think anything of it, but suddenly we were surrounded by six guys saying, 'Which one of you called my mate a fucking wanker?' One of those, you know? So then they started punching and kicking us...they weren't fun times. Dave used to get beaten up all the time for dressing out of the norm."
Born in Epping in 1962, Dave Gahan's ingrained Essex vowels are still discernible beneath his lightly Americanised, David St Hubbins twang. Gahan's clearly running on some kind of tightly wound internal motor, even in his off-duty rock star clobber of sober suit and sensible haircut. There remains something of a Jack-The-Lad about Gahan, the teenage tearaway who once terrorised Basildon, spraypainting walls and stealing cars.
"I just wanted attention," he shrugs. "I put my mum through a rough time, in and out of juvenile court. It was petty crap - driving and taking away, criminal damage, theft. My mum did the best she could if the law would show up. I remember one time when this police car pulled up outside. She said, 'Is it for you?' and I said 'Yes.' I distinctly remember her saying, 'David's been in all night.' But I'd written my name on a wall in paint!"
Gahan ended up in weekend custody at a sub-Borstal 'attendance centre' in Romford. "It was a real pain in the arse. You had to work - I remember doing boxing, stuff like that. You had to have your hair cut. It was every weekend, so you were deprived of your weekend, and it seemed like forever. I was told very clearly that my next thing was detention centre. To be honest, music saved me."
The founding members of Depeche Mode all grew up in working class religiously-inclined families. Gore and Gahan were both raised by their stepfathers, only meeting their biological fathers later in life. They were weaned on glam rock and soul. David Bowie and Gary Glitter, Sparks and Kraftwerk. But when punk hit Basildon, it changed everything. Thanks to newly cheap synthesisers, working class teenagers with limited musical ability could suddenly make arty, avant garde pop.
"All these early Eighties bands were working class kids," nods Fletch. "We came out of a time where prog rock musicians were completely the opposite, public schoolboys. Punk came along when we were 16 and it all changed - working class kids, coming out of art colleges all over the country, wanting to make music."
Punk was a revelation to Gahan, too. He had been a soulboy, blagging his way into clubs, experimenting with sex and drugs - mainly amphetamines, but an early flirtation with heroin, too. Then he joined the Damned fan club and began attending Clash, 999 and X-Ray Specs gigs at Chancellor Hall in Chelmsford.
"Seeing The Clash just made me think, 'I can do that'," Dave nods. "I've always been a bit of an exhibitionist and when I was really young the aunts would come round and I would entertain my mum by doing my best Mick Jagger or Gary Glitter impression across the room, make everybody laugh. I wasn't really good at anything else, but I saw that it really got a reaction."
Inevitably, Gahan fancied himself as a punk frontman. "I rehearsed a couple of times with a few bands," he says. "There was one that my friend Tony Burgess played drums in, he didn't actually have a drum kit, he played biscuit tins. Never played a gig, just rehearsing after school. They were called The Vermin. They were very famous in that one area of Basildon. In our own minds we were going to be the next Sex Pistols."
When instant rock fame failed to materialise, Dave enrolled at art college. But he was still "humping gear" and occasionally singing for a friend's New Wave band, The French Look. The group shared its keyboard player, Martin Gore, with Composition Of Sound, featuring Andy Fletcher on bass and Vince Clarke on guitar and vocals. Fletch now recalls the trio sounding like a "dodgy Cure". Like their immediate contemporaries in U2, the unlikely link between these three shy, studious lads was religion.
"If you could get a job, you could get a house," Fletch continues. "But in the Seventies it started to go wrong - the town expanded quickly, there were no jobs left. When I was growing up we had fields, football, cricket, countryside - but then it all went wrong economically. It's now a huge town with not many jobs, and young people with nothing to do."
Martin Gore, also 39, initially seems more wary than his schoolyard friend Fletch. Our first encounter feels rather like a job interview, with Gore the nervy candidate for a junior clerical position. But he is quick to laugh at himself, scrupulously polite and forthcoming. Later during a follow-up phone chat which overruns by half an hour, he will apologise profusely for being called away to take his wife to the gym. Not many millionaire pop stars are this civil.
"I really hated Basildon," nods the elfin songwriter in his wistful, Ron Manager accent - ah yes, leather boys in the park, cock rings for goalposts. "I wanted to get out as quickly as I could. I think being in a band was an escape. There was very little to do. It's one of those places where you go drinking because that's your only option. I hear it's a pretty horrible place these days."
The threat of violence was ever-present during Gore's teens. "When I was about 17 or 18, me and my friend were walking back from a party in Laindon, which is close to Basildon," he says, "and we heard this running behind us. We didn't think anything of it, but suddenly we were surrounded by six guys saying, 'Which one of you called my mate a fucking wanker?' One of those, you know? So then they started punching and kicking us...they weren't fun times. Dave used to get beaten up all the time for dressing out of the norm."
Born in Epping in 1962, Dave Gahan's ingrained Essex vowels are still discernible beneath his lightly Americanised, David St Hubbins twang. Gahan's clearly running on some kind of tightly wound internal motor, even in his off-duty rock star clobber of sober suit and sensible haircut. There remains something of a Jack-The-Lad about Gahan, the teenage tearaway who once terrorised Basildon, spraypainting walls and stealing cars.
"I just wanted attention," he shrugs. "I put my mum through a rough time, in and out of juvenile court. It was petty crap - driving and taking away, criminal damage, theft. My mum did the best she could if the law would show up. I remember one time when this police car pulled up outside. She said, 'Is it for you?' and I said 'Yes.' I distinctly remember her saying, 'David's been in all night.' But I'd written my name on a wall in paint!"
Gahan ended up in weekend custody at a sub-Borstal 'attendance centre' in Romford. "It was a real pain in the arse. You had to work - I remember doing boxing, stuff like that. You had to have your hair cut. It was every weekend, so you were deprived of your weekend, and it seemed like forever. I was told very clearly that my next thing was detention centre. To be honest, music saved me."
The founding members of Depeche Mode all grew up in working class religiously-inclined families. Gore and Gahan were both raised by their stepfathers, only meeting their biological fathers later in life. They were weaned on glam rock and soul. David Bowie and Gary Glitter, Sparks and Kraftwerk. But when punk hit Basildon, it changed everything. Thanks to newly cheap synthesisers, working class teenagers with limited musical ability could suddenly make arty, avant garde pop.
"All these early Eighties bands were working class kids," nods Fletch. "We came out of a time where prog rock musicians were completely the opposite, public schoolboys. Punk came along when we were 16 and it all changed - working class kids, coming out of art colleges all over the country, wanting to make music."
Punk was a revelation to Gahan, too. He had been a soulboy, blagging his way into clubs, experimenting with sex and drugs - mainly amphetamines, but an early flirtation with heroin, too. Then he joined the Damned fan club and began attending Clash, 999 and X-Ray Specs gigs at Chancellor Hall in Chelmsford.
"Seeing The Clash just made me think, 'I can do that'," Dave nods. "I've always been a bit of an exhibitionist and when I was really young the aunts would come round and I would entertain my mum by doing my best Mick Jagger or Gary Glitter impression across the room, make everybody laugh. I wasn't really good at anything else, but I saw that it really got a reaction."
Inevitably, Gahan fancied himself as a punk frontman. "I rehearsed a couple of times with a few bands," he says. "There was one that my friend Tony Burgess played drums in, he didn't actually have a drum kit, he played biscuit tins. Never played a gig, just rehearsing after school. They were called The Vermin. They were very famous in that one area of Basildon. In our own minds we were going to be the next Sex Pistols."
When instant rock fame failed to materialise, Dave enrolled at art college. But he was still "humping gear" and occasionally singing for a friend's New Wave band, The French Look. The group shared its keyboard player, Martin Gore, with Composition Of Sound, featuring Andy Fletcher on bass and Vince Clarke on guitar and vocals. Fletch now recalls the trio sounding like a "dodgy Cure". Like their immediate contemporaries in U2, the unlikely link between these three shy, studious lads was religion.
"Vince and I were born-again Christians from the age of 11 to about 18," explains Fletch. "Dave wasn't, and Martin just used to come along because he liked the singing. That was where we learned how to play instruments and sing - we learned our trade, I suppose. We used to go to Greenbelt every year from the age of 11, which is a massive Christian rock festival. In fact I once saw U2 there, in 1980."
Fletch no longer feels any faith or devotion, and is therefore condemned to burn for all eternity. "I'm worse than a non-believer," he nods. "The Bible says a person who believes and then doesn't believe is going to be spewed out of God's mouth. Then I go down to the boilers and stoke coal. To be honest, it was more the social aspect of the church, and the music. It was quite a big social scene and in Basildon, there wasn't much else to do. You had to either steal cars or go to church."
Gore was never a believer either, but an enduring curiosity about spirituality still runs through his blasphemous beats and devotional lyrics. A lover of gospel music and a keen student of everything from occultism to Buddhism, Martin has always distrusted organised religion.
"At some point I just get put off," he shrugs. "I think Jesus was one of the greatest figures that ever walked the earth. He never said a word of shit. Every book I read about him, I fall in love with him more and more, but unfortunately that doesn't help me become a Christian because Christianity is something else."
Gore also took a "quite pious" anti-drugs stance in his youth. "If I ever saw anyone doing them around me I would walk away," he says. "It was kind of a moral thing at the time, I don't know why. Maybe it was fear as well, because I'd been quite sheltered and never done it - I just didn't want to get involved."
Vince Clarke was the songwriter and driving force behind Composition Of Sound, but a reluctant frontman. One day, after hearing Gahan belting out Bowie's "Heroes" in a school rehearsal room, he offered Dave the post of singer.
"About a week later I got this phone call from Vince," Gahan recalls. "He said 'Was that you singing?' and I said "Yes" - it was actually a bunch of people singing, but I said it was me. They were already gigging as well, and I had this bunch of friends who liked to dress up and go to gigs. So we almost had a ready-made audience of about 30 people who were the cool people of Southend. Friday night people. The oddballs."
Gahan was the band's missing jigsaw piece. Although a mere mouthpiece for songwriters Clarke and Gore, his laddish charisma sent a jolt of punky rock 'n' roll through their electro-pop machine. Always a sharp dresser, he rechristened the quartet Depeche Mode after a French fashion magazine - translated literally, the name means "fast fashion", although it simply sounded cool at the time. A future supergroup was born.
Throughout 1980 and early 1981, Depeche Mode became local legends in Essex clubland. Vince Clarke honed a catchy, hook laden, upbeat pop formula that sat somewhat incongruously with the band's emerging leather and chains uniform. Martin, especially, was developing a taste for skirts and make-up which would lead to endless speculation about his sexuality.
"I honestly don't know what was going through my head when I was doing that," he sighs. "There was some kind of sexuality to it that I liked and enjoyed, but I look back now and see a lot of the pictures and I'm embarrassed. But it never crossed my mind that I might be gay. I always knew I was heterosexual. Over the years I've met so many people that have naturally assumed I'm gay - I don't have a problem with that. The fact that I'm not is neither here nor there." [1]
Mute Records boss Daniel Miller, who eventually signed Depeche Mode, argues that fetishism and bondage was key to the Essex post-punk underground. Derived from Lou Reed and Suicide, it was the region's hardcore answer to goth and New Romantic. The Mode were never New Romantics. Miller calls them "futurists - a very subtle difference." They appealed to his vision for Mute as a modernist, Eurocentric, pro-electronic label.
But his first encounter with the band, at the Rough Trade shop in west London, was hardly promising. "It wasn't that I wasn't impressed, I didn't actually listen," Miller admits. "I was in the middle of something else, they wanted to play me stuff, and I said I can't listen to it now. I just thought they looked like dodgy New Romantics. I didn't even hear the music at that point. The first time I heard the music was at this gig in Canning Town. I didn't even associate them as being the same group."
Fletch no longer feels any faith or devotion, and is therefore condemned to burn for all eternity. "I'm worse than a non-believer," he nods. "The Bible says a person who believes and then doesn't believe is going to be spewed out of God's mouth. Then I go down to the boilers and stoke coal. To be honest, it was more the social aspect of the church, and the music. It was quite a big social scene and in Basildon, there wasn't much else to do. You had to either steal cars or go to church."
Gore was never a believer either, but an enduring curiosity about spirituality still runs through his blasphemous beats and devotional lyrics. A lover of gospel music and a keen student of everything from occultism to Buddhism, Martin has always distrusted organised religion.
"At some point I just get put off," he shrugs. "I think Jesus was one of the greatest figures that ever walked the earth. He never said a word of shit. Every book I read about him, I fall in love with him more and more, but unfortunately that doesn't help me become a Christian because Christianity is something else."
Gore also took a "quite pious" anti-drugs stance in his youth. "If I ever saw anyone doing them around me I would walk away," he says. "It was kind of a moral thing at the time, I don't know why. Maybe it was fear as well, because I'd been quite sheltered and never done it - I just didn't want to get involved."
Vince Clarke was the songwriter and driving force behind Composition Of Sound, but a reluctant frontman. One day, after hearing Gahan belting out Bowie's "Heroes" in a school rehearsal room, he offered Dave the post of singer.
"About a week later I got this phone call from Vince," Gahan recalls. "He said 'Was that you singing?' and I said "Yes" - it was actually a bunch of people singing, but I said it was me. They were already gigging as well, and I had this bunch of friends who liked to dress up and go to gigs. So we almost had a ready-made audience of about 30 people who were the cool people of Southend. Friday night people. The oddballs."
Gahan was the band's missing jigsaw piece. Although a mere mouthpiece for songwriters Clarke and Gore, his laddish charisma sent a jolt of punky rock 'n' roll through their electro-pop machine. Always a sharp dresser, he rechristened the quartet Depeche Mode after a French fashion magazine - translated literally, the name means "fast fashion", although it simply sounded cool at the time. A future supergroup was born.
Throughout 1980 and early 1981, Depeche Mode became local legends in Essex clubland. Vince Clarke honed a catchy, hook laden, upbeat pop formula that sat somewhat incongruously with the band's emerging leather and chains uniform. Martin, especially, was developing a taste for skirts and make-up which would lead to endless speculation about his sexuality.
"I honestly don't know what was going through my head when I was doing that," he sighs. "There was some kind of sexuality to it that I liked and enjoyed, but I look back now and see a lot of the pictures and I'm embarrassed. But it never crossed my mind that I might be gay. I always knew I was heterosexual. Over the years I've met so many people that have naturally assumed I'm gay - I don't have a problem with that. The fact that I'm not is neither here nor there." [1]
Mute Records boss Daniel Miller, who eventually signed Depeche Mode, argues that fetishism and bondage was key to the Essex post-punk underground. Derived from Lou Reed and Suicide, it was the region's hardcore answer to goth and New Romantic. The Mode were never New Romantics. Miller calls them "futurists - a very subtle difference." They appealed to his vision for Mute as a modernist, Eurocentric, pro-electronic label.
But his first encounter with the band, at the Rough Trade shop in west London, was hardly promising. "It wasn't that I wasn't impressed, I didn't actually listen," Miller admits. "I was in the middle of something else, they wanted to play me stuff, and I said I can't listen to it now. I just thought they looked like dodgy New Romantics. I didn't even hear the music at that point. The first time I heard the music was at this gig in Canning Town. I didn't even associate them as being the same group."
Mute were far from the obvious choice, but Clarke persuaded his fellow Mode members that Miller's left-field pop instincts would serve them well in the long term. "We've got a better chance on Mute," he explained in an early Sounds interview. "Daniel's been good to us and we like the way he operates."
Gore recalls being offered "ridiculous amounts of money" to sign with various major labels, but they chose Miller largely because they admired Mute artists like Fad Gadget, The Normal and Silicon Teens. "We were very lucky that we did," Martin nods. "One of the people after us was Mark Dean who went on to sign Wham! - that whole fiasco. I'm sure if we'd have signed to any one of those major labels we wouldn't be around today. We'd have been dropped by our second or third album."
The foursome agreed a handshake deal with Mute at the start of 1981, accepting a 50/50 profit-share which later became the god standard for artist-led labels. They would not sign a formal contract for 20 years. "I thought that if you're fair with an artist, if you pay them, give them the freedom you want and do the best to promote their records, why would you want a contract?" Miller says. "Why get lawyers involved? It just seemed impure."
Although their unorthodox Mute deal would eventually prove highly lucrative to both band and label, the Mode spent their early career watching the pennies. Even while gigging and recording their debut album Speak & Spell in 1981, Fletch and Gore stuck with their banking and insurance jobs in east London. When their second single "New Life" shot to Number 11 in June, they travelled to their debut Top of The Pops appearance by tube.
"I didn't have a choice," Fletch shrugs. "There was no advance at all." I think Vince got a small publishing advance, and we got a hundred quid, so we didn't have any money. All we ever wanted was our beer money and to give our mums 10 quid a week, and that was it. It was a bit peculiar - I think for the first two years we went to Top Of The Pops on the tube with our synths and things. I'd go into work the next day and get a standing ovation."
But just as success loomed, the Mode masterplan faltered. Vince Clarke announced his decision to quit the band even before Speak & Spell became a Top 10 album in October 1981. "I never expected the band to be this successful," Clarke said soon after quitting. "I didn't feel happy. Or contented. Or fulfilled. And that's why I left. All the things that come with success had suddenly become more important than the music. There was never enough time to do anything."
With hindsight, Fletch suggests that Clarke simply felt he could fare better outside the group - which he would soon prove with Yazoo and later, Erasure. "Vince was always the ambitions one," says Fletch. "He was the driving force behind the band initially. He was unemployed, he used to get 30 quid a week and he'd save, like, 29 pounds 86p. He used to get one loaf of bread a week."
Two decades later, Martin Gore remains baffled by Clarke's departure. "Maybe it was personal, maybe there were frictions," he speculates, "minor frictions compared to what we've put up with for the past 20 years. One thing that might have been a turning point was when he came along to rehearsal with two new songs, and he was teaching us how they went, and when he went to the toilet we just looked at each other and said, "We can't sing these, they're terrible!"
One of the new songs dismissed as derivative rubbish was 'Only You', later a huge hit for Yazoo, the pop duo Clarke formed with Alison Moyet after leaving the Mode. "Great song," sighs Fletch. "It's a mistake anyone can make."
Fletch insists post-split relations with Yazoo were amicable, but admits "You had to be careful with Alison because she'd just beat you up. She was in our class at school and she was the best fighter in the year. Once, when we were in this small Mute office, she thought we were laughing at her and she said, 'Fletch, if you laugh at me once again I'll kick you in the bollocks.' Never laugh at Alison Moyet. She will kill you on the spot."
Gore says the Mode were "in shellshock" after Clarke left, but it was also a "godsend" for his songwriting ambitions. The band advertised in Melody Maker for a replacement keyboard player. West Londoner Alan Wilder was recruited on a weekly wage of £50 in late 1981, initially for live shows only. He would not become a full band member for 18 months.
At first, Wilder's more middle-class roots created distrust in the band. "They were very 'Bas'," recalls Daniel Miller. "All their friends were from Basildon and Alan came from a slightly different - slightly posher, in their eyes - background. He was musically very adept and, at the beginning, slightly snobbish about the fact that everything they played was one-finger monophonic stuff."
Due to his more advanced abilities, Wilder was initially branded a 'muso', the ultimate punk insult. "I suppose my classical upbringing was a factor in this," he says. "What I added was an enthusiasm and desire to experiment more. I was also desperate for us to be taken more seriously, which meant producing a darker, more weighty sound."
Wilder also brought a certain symmetry to the Mode, functioning as Gahan's party-loving ally, while close friends Fletch and Gore formed a more introverted faction. Years later these divisions would fuel serious friction. But the new boy's first impressions were mostly positive.
Gore recalls being offered "ridiculous amounts of money" to sign with various major labels, but they chose Miller largely because they admired Mute artists like Fad Gadget, The Normal and Silicon Teens. "We were very lucky that we did," Martin nods. "One of the people after us was Mark Dean who went on to sign Wham! - that whole fiasco. I'm sure if we'd have signed to any one of those major labels we wouldn't be around today. We'd have been dropped by our second or third album."
The foursome agreed a handshake deal with Mute at the start of 1981, accepting a 50/50 profit-share which later became the god standard for artist-led labels. They would not sign a formal contract for 20 years. "I thought that if you're fair with an artist, if you pay them, give them the freedom you want and do the best to promote their records, why would you want a contract?" Miller says. "Why get lawyers involved? It just seemed impure."
Although their unorthodox Mute deal would eventually prove highly lucrative to both band and label, the Mode spent their early career watching the pennies. Even while gigging and recording their debut album Speak & Spell in 1981, Fletch and Gore stuck with their banking and insurance jobs in east London. When their second single "New Life" shot to Number 11 in June, they travelled to their debut Top of The Pops appearance by tube.
"I didn't have a choice," Fletch shrugs. "There was no advance at all." I think Vince got a small publishing advance, and we got a hundred quid, so we didn't have any money. All we ever wanted was our beer money and to give our mums 10 quid a week, and that was it. It was a bit peculiar - I think for the first two years we went to Top Of The Pops on the tube with our synths and things. I'd go into work the next day and get a standing ovation."
But just as success loomed, the Mode masterplan faltered. Vince Clarke announced his decision to quit the band even before Speak & Spell became a Top 10 album in October 1981. "I never expected the band to be this successful," Clarke said soon after quitting. "I didn't feel happy. Or contented. Or fulfilled. And that's why I left. All the things that come with success had suddenly become more important than the music. There was never enough time to do anything."
With hindsight, Fletch suggests that Clarke simply felt he could fare better outside the group - which he would soon prove with Yazoo and later, Erasure. "Vince was always the ambitions one," says Fletch. "He was the driving force behind the band initially. He was unemployed, he used to get 30 quid a week and he'd save, like, 29 pounds 86p. He used to get one loaf of bread a week."
Two decades later, Martin Gore remains baffled by Clarke's departure. "Maybe it was personal, maybe there were frictions," he speculates, "minor frictions compared to what we've put up with for the past 20 years. One thing that might have been a turning point was when he came along to rehearsal with two new songs, and he was teaching us how they went, and when he went to the toilet we just looked at each other and said, "We can't sing these, they're terrible!"
One of the new songs dismissed as derivative rubbish was 'Only You', later a huge hit for Yazoo, the pop duo Clarke formed with Alison Moyet after leaving the Mode. "Great song," sighs Fletch. "It's a mistake anyone can make."
Fletch insists post-split relations with Yazoo were amicable, but admits "You had to be careful with Alison because she'd just beat you up. She was in our class at school and she was the best fighter in the year. Once, when we were in this small Mute office, she thought we were laughing at her and she said, 'Fletch, if you laugh at me once again I'll kick you in the bollocks.' Never laugh at Alison Moyet. She will kill you on the spot."
Gore says the Mode were "in shellshock" after Clarke left, but it was also a "godsend" for his songwriting ambitions. The band advertised in Melody Maker for a replacement keyboard player. West Londoner Alan Wilder was recruited on a weekly wage of £50 in late 1981, initially for live shows only. He would not become a full band member for 18 months.
At first, Wilder's more middle-class roots created distrust in the band. "They were very 'Bas'," recalls Daniel Miller. "All their friends were from Basildon and Alan came from a slightly different - slightly posher, in their eyes - background. He was musically very adept and, at the beginning, slightly snobbish about the fact that everything they played was one-finger monophonic stuff."
Due to his more advanced abilities, Wilder was initially branded a 'muso', the ultimate punk insult. "I suppose my classical upbringing was a factor in this," he says. "What I added was an enthusiasm and desire to experiment more. I was also desperate for us to be taken more seriously, which meant producing a darker, more weighty sound."
Wilder also brought a certain symmetry to the Mode, functioning as Gahan's party-loving ally, while close friends Fletch and Gore formed a more introverted faction. Years later these divisions would fuel serious friction. But the new boy's first impressions were mostly positive.
Last edited:
"They were a very tight unit, somewhat self-deprecating and lacking in confidence," Wilder recalls. "All the musicians I'd been involved with prior to this had exuded self-belief while enjoying little or no success. I'd never met a group like this one, and it made me wonder how they had come so far in such a short time. Then I realised how much influence Daniel Miller had over them. As I got to know them, it became clear that it was actually Vince Clarke and Daniel who had been the driving forces up to that point."
Miller was indeed a crucial "co-producer and collaborator" on the first few Mode albums, but denies dictating their sound. "It's a bit of a joke," he says. "I was only a bit more experienced than them in the studio. But I had ideas about how to push it, move it forward."
Alan Wilder came on board just as Depeche Mode's honeymoon with the pop press began to curdle. As their dirty electro sound hardened, chart music softened. The gleefully synthetic New Pop generation was being supplanted by Thatcherite fluff and windy, worthy stadium rock. The synth pop trend withered, but the Mode stuck unfashionably to their guns. Although their commercial profile would build steadily throughout the Eighties, UK critics consistently dismissed the band as comically pervy lightweights. They were a Casiotone Cure, a Toytown New Order, but without the credibility or mystique of either. Reviewers were savage.
"If I'd been writing reviews at the time I'd have given us a bad review," Gore concedes. "At least the first couple of albums, and probably a bit longer. But we also really suffered because of our image. We had a really awful image. Once you hate something and get a bee in your bonnet about it, you have to really work to gain people's trust back."
Daniel Miller argues that regional snobbery worked against the band in their early days. "They didn't come from London or Manchester or Liverpool or Edinburgh," he says. "They came from Basildon, which is almost like Neasden or something. That was always mentioned in interviews in a slightly snidey way."
Dave Gahan says, "You know what England's like - the first thing you ever do, that's it. It's written on your gravestone. When we first started, we just did anything that was put in front of us and we were very happy to do it. All these TV programmes and mags were interested - your Swap Shop and your Smash Hits. But we looked fucking horrible in some of those early pictures, and I don't think we ever lived it down."
America, which would later embrace the Mode as stadium rock gods, proved to be even more indifferent than Britain in 1982. On a short spring tour, Gahan performed with his arm in a sling - ironically, he had just had his teenage tattoos removed, and the scars had swollen up badly. The tour started badly, and got worse.
"We played the Ritz club in New York," recalls Fletch. "The first gig that Alan played. We'd done Top Of The Pops the night before - why we agreed to, I don't know. But Mute decided to send us over on Concorde. Unfortunately it was probably the most disastrous gig of our lives. None of the equipment worked, we didn't go onstage until 2.30 in the morning. A guy outside said to me afterwards, 'What happened to you lot? You used to be good...'"
After their transitional post-Clarke album, A Broken Frame, the Mode recorded a trio of albums which marked Gore's coming-of-age as a songwriter, heralding a new lyrical darkness and hard-edged sound. Its 1983 sequel, Construction Time Again, was mixed at Berlin's Hansa Ton studios, the 'hall by the Wall' famous for Bowie's 'Heroes' and, later, landmark albums by Nick Cave and U2. Hansa became their regular studio for the next three years. The studio was recommended by Gareth Jones, the Mode's long-term engineer. A strong pound also made it significantly cheaper to relocate the band to Germany rather than pay London rates. Besides, Berlin was a 24-hour party city and the Basildon boys were starting to live a pop-star party lifestyle.
Martin Gore, who ended up moving to Berlin for two years, recalls, "It was a significant time for me personally, because before that I'd been going out with a girl was a devout Christian who really had me on reins. She was ridiculous - anything was perverted. If I watched something on TV and there was somebody naked, I was a pervert. When I finally left her, I started going out with a girl in Berlin and suddenly discovered all this freedom."
Gore's growing interest in S&M found an outlet in Berlin's famously Bohemian club scene. and it was there he would compose sado-erotic anthems such as 'Master And Servant' for 1984's Some Great Reward, the more industrial-flavoured sequel to Construction Time Again. But the songwriter plays down his interest in domination and submission.
"There's only one or two songs that ever touched on S&M," Gore argues, "There was a time when I used to go out to a lot of those clubs anyway, just out of interest. I was never heavily into it, but it was a fascinating scene. But sex is an interesting part of life. I may seem to write about it a lot, but I don't think I overdo it."
Miller was indeed a crucial "co-producer and collaborator" on the first few Mode albums, but denies dictating their sound. "It's a bit of a joke," he says. "I was only a bit more experienced than them in the studio. But I had ideas about how to push it, move it forward."
Alan Wilder came on board just as Depeche Mode's honeymoon with the pop press began to curdle. As their dirty electro sound hardened, chart music softened. The gleefully synthetic New Pop generation was being supplanted by Thatcherite fluff and windy, worthy stadium rock. The synth pop trend withered, but the Mode stuck unfashionably to their guns. Although their commercial profile would build steadily throughout the Eighties, UK critics consistently dismissed the band as comically pervy lightweights. They were a Casiotone Cure, a Toytown New Order, but without the credibility or mystique of either. Reviewers were savage.
"If I'd been writing reviews at the time I'd have given us a bad review," Gore concedes. "At least the first couple of albums, and probably a bit longer. But we also really suffered because of our image. We had a really awful image. Once you hate something and get a bee in your bonnet about it, you have to really work to gain people's trust back."
Daniel Miller argues that regional snobbery worked against the band in their early days. "They didn't come from London or Manchester or Liverpool or Edinburgh," he says. "They came from Basildon, which is almost like Neasden or something. That was always mentioned in interviews in a slightly snidey way."
Dave Gahan says, "You know what England's like - the first thing you ever do, that's it. It's written on your gravestone. When we first started, we just did anything that was put in front of us and we were very happy to do it. All these TV programmes and mags were interested - your Swap Shop and your Smash Hits. But we looked fucking horrible in some of those early pictures, and I don't think we ever lived it down."
America, which would later embrace the Mode as stadium rock gods, proved to be even more indifferent than Britain in 1982. On a short spring tour, Gahan performed with his arm in a sling - ironically, he had just had his teenage tattoos removed, and the scars had swollen up badly. The tour started badly, and got worse.
"We played the Ritz club in New York," recalls Fletch. "The first gig that Alan played. We'd done Top Of The Pops the night before - why we agreed to, I don't know. But Mute decided to send us over on Concorde. Unfortunately it was probably the most disastrous gig of our lives. None of the equipment worked, we didn't go onstage until 2.30 in the morning. A guy outside said to me afterwards, 'What happened to you lot? You used to be good...'"
After their transitional post-Clarke album, A Broken Frame, the Mode recorded a trio of albums which marked Gore's coming-of-age as a songwriter, heralding a new lyrical darkness and hard-edged sound. Its 1983 sequel, Construction Time Again, was mixed at Berlin's Hansa Ton studios, the 'hall by the Wall' famous for Bowie's 'Heroes' and, later, landmark albums by Nick Cave and U2. Hansa became their regular studio for the next three years. The studio was recommended by Gareth Jones, the Mode's long-term engineer. A strong pound also made it significantly cheaper to relocate the band to Germany rather than pay London rates. Besides, Berlin was a 24-hour party city and the Basildon boys were starting to live a pop-star party lifestyle.
Martin Gore, who ended up moving to Berlin for two years, recalls, "It was a significant time for me personally, because before that I'd been going out with a girl was a devout Christian who really had me on reins. She was ridiculous - anything was perverted. If I watched something on TV and there was somebody naked, I was a pervert. When I finally left her, I started going out with a girl in Berlin and suddenly discovered all this freedom."
Gore's growing interest in S&M found an outlet in Berlin's famously Bohemian club scene. and it was there he would compose sado-erotic anthems such as 'Master And Servant' for 1984's Some Great Reward, the more industrial-flavoured sequel to Construction Time Again. But the songwriter plays down his interest in domination and submission.
"There's only one or two songs that ever touched on S&M," Gore argues, "There was a time when I used to go out to a lot of those clubs anyway, just out of interest. I was never heavily into it, but it was a fascinating scene. But sex is an interesting part of life. I may seem to write about it a lot, but I don't think I overdo it."
Alan Wilder confirms, "We certainly saw Martin come out of his shell during this time. It seemed as though he had some catching up to do, having been a quiet and reserved teenager by all accounts. Frequenting clubs and bars became more routine and we all saw a very different side to Martin when he was let loose, so to speak - heavy drinking followed by apparel-removal being top of his list of favourite activities."
The Mode's reputation as small-town synth-pop lightweights still dogged them during the Berlin years. While Gore flirted with gentle S&M symbolism, Frankie Goes To Hollywood took a much more upfront and marketable leather clone look to the top of the charts. When Depeche Mode began tinkering with industrial rhythms, they were overshadowed by hardcore metal-bashing hipsters such as Test Department or Einsturzende Neubaten. Unlucky timing and critical disdain conspired to belittle their progressive pop agenda.
The Berlin sessions were a confusing time for Gahan. He acquired the nickname of 'Caj', as in 'casualty', for his all-too-real impression of a wasted rock star. But he could also turn puritanical, dismissing his fellow band members for their juvenile indulgence. "It would piss me off," he says now, "but I think that was more because I felt I was missing out on something."
In August 1985, Gahan married his long-term girlfriend Joanne. They moved into a semi-detached Essex home, bought several sports cars and tried to play happy families. But the singer was constantly torn between domesticity and debauchery, dependable husband and wild frontman.
"I wouldn't say I was 100 per cent comfortable in either. I needed both," Gahan admits. "I definitely needed family and stability, but I was always itching to get out and play. But somewhere along the line, especially after all my antics during the late Eighties and early Nineties. I found a way to keep both and do both."
In 1985, the Mode consolidated their huge European congregation with their first greatest hits collection, Singles 1981-85. Afterwards, while recording the masterful Black Celebration in Berlin in 1986, the band signed their first legal agreement with Daniel Miller on the morbid grounds that he might die at any moment.
"Up until that point we didn't actually have a contract," says Gore. "It was a handshake and an honour kind of thing. But we started thinking that Daniel's getting on now, and he's also overweight, so what would happen if anything happened to him? What would our position have been?"
Relations between the Mode and Miller were also becoming strained. Following clashes over the new album's lack of obvious singles, an exasperated Gore disappeared to stay with a former school exchange friend in northern Germany. "There were quite a lot of arguments going on around that time," Gore recalls. "We'd overdone the working relationship between Daniel and Gareth Jones. That was the third album we'd done together and I think everybody'd become very lazy, relying on formulas."
In fact, the Teutonic torch songs and Wagnerian lullabies of Black Celebration helped make it the Mode's biggest hit to date. A Top Three album in Britain, it also earned a significant cult following in America, where the band are licensed by Mute to the mighty Warners corporation. Four years after their disastrous 1982 jaunt, the foursome decided to risk another US tour. The strength of underground Mode mania overwhelmed them.
"It sold out in a second," Fletch recalls. "We had this bizarre situation - we'd never had a Top 40 album in America, or even a Top 100 album, but we were playing to 30,000 people."
The rise of 'alternative' rock radio was crucial to the Mode's US success. "One of the problems we've always had with Britain is our so-called dodgy past, but America never got that," says Fletch. "In fact, they thought it was quaint. You've got to remember punk had passed them by, and they had this horrible music at the time. This was the first time Americans were starting to listen to music that wasn't Journey and Aerosmith. And from that radio format, bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam came about."
Alan Wilder suggests the Mode's embracing of global fame was partly a reaction to 'provincial' British snobbery. Prophets without honour in their own land, they keenly courted other markets. "It seemed that in the late Eighties," Wilder says, "we fitted in perfectly with what the all-American, white middle-class kids seemed to be searching for - a band that was clean cut enough to cross over but subversive enough to push a few boundaries at the same time."
The Black Celebration period marked a significant shift for Depeche Mode. Around this time, they employed a tour accountant, Jonathan Kessler, who would eventually become their first real manager. They also shot their first video with Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, who would shape their visual identity for years afterwards. Just as he did with U2, the 'Old Master' helped re-invent a gawky quartet with a serious image problem as heroic, iconic, post-modern superstars.
For Gahan, this was a step towards credibility. "I felt really comfortable with Anton," Dave nods. "He was trying to portray us in a good light. It wasn't like it was just a job, he definitely was in it for the long term."
The next Mode album, Music For The Masses, would make them fully-fledged US stadium stars. Recorded in Paris, the album title was intended to be an ironic comment on the band's enduring unpopularity. In reality, these epic evocations of travel and sex sold more than half a million copies, grazing the UK Top Ten and the US Top Ten and the US Top 40. Significantly, the single 'Strangelove' was remixed by Bomb The Bass founder and future Mode producer Tim Simenon, one of the band's earliest acknowledgements of club music.
The Mode's reputation as small-town synth-pop lightweights still dogged them during the Berlin years. While Gore flirted with gentle S&M symbolism, Frankie Goes To Hollywood took a much more upfront and marketable leather clone look to the top of the charts. When Depeche Mode began tinkering with industrial rhythms, they were overshadowed by hardcore metal-bashing hipsters such as Test Department or Einsturzende Neubaten. Unlucky timing and critical disdain conspired to belittle their progressive pop agenda.
The Berlin sessions were a confusing time for Gahan. He acquired the nickname of 'Caj', as in 'casualty', for his all-too-real impression of a wasted rock star. But he could also turn puritanical, dismissing his fellow band members for their juvenile indulgence. "It would piss me off," he says now, "but I think that was more because I felt I was missing out on something."
In August 1985, Gahan married his long-term girlfriend Joanne. They moved into a semi-detached Essex home, bought several sports cars and tried to play happy families. But the singer was constantly torn between domesticity and debauchery, dependable husband and wild frontman.
"I wouldn't say I was 100 per cent comfortable in either. I needed both," Gahan admits. "I definitely needed family and stability, but I was always itching to get out and play. But somewhere along the line, especially after all my antics during the late Eighties and early Nineties. I found a way to keep both and do both."
In 1985, the Mode consolidated their huge European congregation with their first greatest hits collection, Singles 1981-85. Afterwards, while recording the masterful Black Celebration in Berlin in 1986, the band signed their first legal agreement with Daniel Miller on the morbid grounds that he might die at any moment.
"Up until that point we didn't actually have a contract," says Gore. "It was a handshake and an honour kind of thing. But we started thinking that Daniel's getting on now, and he's also overweight, so what would happen if anything happened to him? What would our position have been?"
Relations between the Mode and Miller were also becoming strained. Following clashes over the new album's lack of obvious singles, an exasperated Gore disappeared to stay with a former school exchange friend in northern Germany. "There were quite a lot of arguments going on around that time," Gore recalls. "We'd overdone the working relationship between Daniel and Gareth Jones. That was the third album we'd done together and I think everybody'd become very lazy, relying on formulas."
In fact, the Teutonic torch songs and Wagnerian lullabies of Black Celebration helped make it the Mode's biggest hit to date. A Top Three album in Britain, it also earned a significant cult following in America, where the band are licensed by Mute to the mighty Warners corporation. Four years after their disastrous 1982 jaunt, the foursome decided to risk another US tour. The strength of underground Mode mania overwhelmed them.
"It sold out in a second," Fletch recalls. "We had this bizarre situation - we'd never had a Top 40 album in America, or even a Top 100 album, but we were playing to 30,000 people."
The rise of 'alternative' rock radio was crucial to the Mode's US success. "One of the problems we've always had with Britain is our so-called dodgy past, but America never got that," says Fletch. "In fact, they thought it was quaint. You've got to remember punk had passed them by, and they had this horrible music at the time. This was the first time Americans were starting to listen to music that wasn't Journey and Aerosmith. And from that radio format, bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam came about."
Alan Wilder suggests the Mode's embracing of global fame was partly a reaction to 'provincial' British snobbery. Prophets without honour in their own land, they keenly courted other markets. "It seemed that in the late Eighties," Wilder says, "we fitted in perfectly with what the all-American, white middle-class kids seemed to be searching for - a band that was clean cut enough to cross over but subversive enough to push a few boundaries at the same time."
The Black Celebration period marked a significant shift for Depeche Mode. Around this time, they employed a tour accountant, Jonathan Kessler, who would eventually become their first real manager. They also shot their first video with Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, who would shape their visual identity for years afterwards. Just as he did with U2, the 'Old Master' helped re-invent a gawky quartet with a serious image problem as heroic, iconic, post-modern superstars.
For Gahan, this was a step towards credibility. "I felt really comfortable with Anton," Dave nods. "He was trying to portray us in a good light. It wasn't like it was just a job, he definitely was in it for the long term."
The next Mode album, Music For The Masses, would make them fully-fledged US stadium stars. Recorded in Paris, the album title was intended to be an ironic comment on the band's enduring unpopularity. In reality, these epic evocations of travel and sex sold more than half a million copies, grazing the UK Top Ten and the US Top Ten and the US Top 40. Significantly, the single 'Strangelove' was remixed by Bomb The Bass founder and future Mode producer Tim Simenon, one of the band's earliest acknowledgements of club music.
A month after the album's release, in October 1987, Dave Gahan became a father. He and Joanne named their firstborn son Jack. Eight days later the Mode's biggest tour yet kicked off in Spain. It would rumble on for nine months, during which Gahan alternated between cocaine excess and soul-sapping guilt. "I felt like shit because I constantly cheated on my wife," he confessed six years later. "I went home and lied, my soul needed cleansing badly."
The final show of the tour, at the Pasadena Rosebowl near LA on June 18, 1988 was filmed by D.A. Pennebaker and his wife, Chris Hegedus, for the tour documentary 101. Director of the legendary 1965 Bob Dylan documentary Don't Look Back, Pennebaker knew nothing of the band before taking the job. Released in 1989 with a companion live album, 101 inevitably tells only half the story.
"We never really allowed Don Pennebaker to see the darker side of being on the road," admits Wilder. But for Fletch, a celluloid record of selling out a 70,000-seat stadium was justification enough for 101. "No-one believed an alternative band could play to so many people," he says, "and again that set the ball rolling for a lot of bands after us. We were conquering the world."
As Depeche Mode retooled their sound for the Nineties, they were unexpectedly hailed as underground dance pioneers. The rise of rave culture and acid house boosted their cool rating, especially when Detroit techno pioneers like Juan Atkins and Derrick May began to namecheck them as an inspiration. Initially, though, these veteran punks and soulboys were baffled.
"When rave culture started, a lot of techno musicians cited Depeche Mode as big influences," says Daniel Miller. "They didn't quite understand that initially. I understood it completely, but they didn't really like the music very much. They were partiers but not ravers."
In 1989, Depeche Mode flew to Detroit for a meeting with Derrick May arranged by The Face magazine. [1] Alan Wilder later described May as "the most arrogant fucker I've ever met" and his music as "fucking horrible". But for Fletch, being mobbed by American club kids at Detroit's legendary techno club Industry proved inspirational.
"We weren't getting much attention at home so to be mobbed by black kids in Detroit is something," he nods. "We thought we must be doing something right. In those days, that scene was orange juice and no drugs. We just wanted a beer. It was frustrating."
The notion of an extremely white synth-pop band from one of the whitest regions of Britain impacting on the black American club underground might seem highly unlikely - at least as unlikely as Kraftwerk helping to inspire hip-hop. But Martin Gore has always been a fan of blues, soul and gospel music. Around the time of Violator, he also discovered to his amazement that his biological father was a black American GI. This is the one subject he refuses to discuss in our interview, because it "brings up family traumas".
In the late Eighties, Depeche Mode started enlisting credible clubland remixers for their singles, from Bomb The Bass to Underworld to Dave Clarke. [2] Even so, Gore still considers dance music to be "90 per cent dross". But the chemical side of rave culture was another matter, and Ecstasy figured heavily in their Violator sessions of 1989.
"Everybody has a honeymoon period with drugs where everything's fine and you can bounce back the next day," nods Gore. "But that didn't last very long for me. I was always depressed for weeks afterwards. Obviously, everybody has a very different chemical make-up, but in the end it wasn't very productive for me."
But the band's increasingly excessive lifestyle was taking its toll. "It was just one party after another for five, six, seven years," says Fletch. "And it was good, but then it was terrible. It became too much." Beneath his unflappable exterior, Fletch began suffering from severe depression. This may have been a delayed reaction to the death of his sister from stomach cancer in the mid-Eighties, or an obsessive-compulsive streak inherited from his father. He began to morbidly obsess on every minor ailment, despite all medical evidence that he was healthy.
"It was absolutely hopeless, it didn't matter what you said," recalls Gore. "He would sit in the studio moaning with the longest face on, then would get up and kind of shuffle to the floor like an old man. There was one day after he walked out, the rest of us looked at each other and burst out laughing because it just looked like an act! We were thinking he can't be serious! But he was. That was the first week of it happening, we had no idea that he was going through depression."
Fletch finally quit the Violator sessions and checked himself into a south London hospital which, years later, would become synonymous with rock-star rehab - The Priory.
"It was quite a normal place," he recalls. "Now, of course, celebs check in there as a career move. That certainly wasn't the case with me. The day I went there for the first time I thought I was going into a mental institution. It was funny because when I went in there the geezer from the Cure was in there, Lawrence. We were both in the same situation."
Fletch initially spent a month in The Priory, returning several times over the next decade. But he insists his psychological problems are much like any normal person, famous or otherwise. "I think it would have happened whether or not I was in a band."
The final show of the tour, at the Pasadena Rosebowl near LA on June 18, 1988 was filmed by D.A. Pennebaker and his wife, Chris Hegedus, for the tour documentary 101. Director of the legendary 1965 Bob Dylan documentary Don't Look Back, Pennebaker knew nothing of the band before taking the job. Released in 1989 with a companion live album, 101 inevitably tells only half the story.
"We never really allowed Don Pennebaker to see the darker side of being on the road," admits Wilder. But for Fletch, a celluloid record of selling out a 70,000-seat stadium was justification enough for 101. "No-one believed an alternative band could play to so many people," he says, "and again that set the ball rolling for a lot of bands after us. We were conquering the world."
As Depeche Mode retooled their sound for the Nineties, they were unexpectedly hailed as underground dance pioneers. The rise of rave culture and acid house boosted their cool rating, especially when Detroit techno pioneers like Juan Atkins and Derrick May began to namecheck them as an inspiration. Initially, though, these veteran punks and soulboys were baffled.
"When rave culture started, a lot of techno musicians cited Depeche Mode as big influences," says Daniel Miller. "They didn't quite understand that initially. I understood it completely, but they didn't really like the music very much. They were partiers but not ravers."
In 1989, Depeche Mode flew to Detroit for a meeting with Derrick May arranged by The Face magazine. [1] Alan Wilder later described May as "the most arrogant fucker I've ever met" and his music as "fucking horrible". But for Fletch, being mobbed by American club kids at Detroit's legendary techno club Industry proved inspirational.
"We weren't getting much attention at home so to be mobbed by black kids in Detroit is something," he nods. "We thought we must be doing something right. In those days, that scene was orange juice and no drugs. We just wanted a beer. It was frustrating."
The notion of an extremely white synth-pop band from one of the whitest regions of Britain impacting on the black American club underground might seem highly unlikely - at least as unlikely as Kraftwerk helping to inspire hip-hop. But Martin Gore has always been a fan of blues, soul and gospel music. Around the time of Violator, he also discovered to his amazement that his biological father was a black American GI. This is the one subject he refuses to discuss in our interview, because it "brings up family traumas".
In the late Eighties, Depeche Mode started enlisting credible clubland remixers for their singles, from Bomb The Bass to Underworld to Dave Clarke. [2] Even so, Gore still considers dance music to be "90 per cent dross". But the chemical side of rave culture was another matter, and Ecstasy figured heavily in their Violator sessions of 1989.
"Everybody has a honeymoon period with drugs where everything's fine and you can bounce back the next day," nods Gore. "But that didn't last very long for me. I was always depressed for weeks afterwards. Obviously, everybody has a very different chemical make-up, but in the end it wasn't very productive for me."
But the band's increasingly excessive lifestyle was taking its toll. "It was just one party after another for five, six, seven years," says Fletch. "And it was good, but then it was terrible. It became too much." Beneath his unflappable exterior, Fletch began suffering from severe depression. This may have been a delayed reaction to the death of his sister from stomach cancer in the mid-Eighties, or an obsessive-compulsive streak inherited from his father. He began to morbidly obsess on every minor ailment, despite all medical evidence that he was healthy.
"It was absolutely hopeless, it didn't matter what you said," recalls Gore. "He would sit in the studio moaning with the longest face on, then would get up and kind of shuffle to the floor like an old man. There was one day after he walked out, the rest of us looked at each other and burst out laughing because it just looked like an act! We were thinking he can't be serious! But he was. That was the first week of it happening, we had no idea that he was going through depression."
Fletch finally quit the Violator sessions and checked himself into a south London hospital which, years later, would become synonymous with rock-star rehab - The Priory.
"It was quite a normal place," he recalls. "Now, of course, celebs check in there as a career move. That certainly wasn't the case with me. The day I went there for the first time I thought I was going into a mental institution. It was funny because when I went in there the geezer from the Cure was in there, Lawrence. We were both in the same situation."
Fletch initially spent a month in The Priory, returning several times over the next decade. But he insists his psychological problems are much like any normal person, famous or otherwise. "I think it would have happened whether or not I was in a band."
Soon, Fletch's troubles would be overshadowed by Gahan's. "Dave was increasingly living in his own world," says Wilder. "The most unsettling thing was that his drug use adversely affected his personality, either through enhanced aggression or the loss of his greatest asset, his sense of humour. I think I noticed it during the period of recording for Violator in Milan. The 'spanner' in him came to the fore. I remember, for no reason, he deliberately picked a fight with about 10 locals just walking down the street. I was petrified, expecting to be knifed at any moment, but somehow he always got away with that sort of behaviour."
Violator was produced by relative newcomer Mark 'Flood' Ellis, who would later work with U2 and Nick Cave, then given a sleekly contemporary mix by disco veteran Francois Kevorkian. It became a huge transatlantic hit in March 1990, spawning a slew of Top 10 singles, including the techno-glam stomp of 'Personal Jesus' and the sleek, mournful disco lament, 'Enjoy The Silence'. For the first time in the band's career, critical and commercial success came hand in hand.
'Personal Jesus' became a million-selling US single after MTV removed a shot from Anton Corbijn's video, apparently on the grounds of implied bestiality. "The shot of the horse's arse comes when there's all this heavy breathing on the track," explains an incredulous Martin Gore. "I don't know if Anton was consciously trying to be perverted, I think it was more coincidental that it happened at that point. These video people see things very strangely."
As newly crowned godfathers of the burgeoning 'alternative' scene, the Mode embarked on the 75-date World Violation tour to promote the album. In June, they filled two nights at LA's Dodgers Stadium. As support, they invited the newly formed Electronic, featuring New Order's Bernard Sumner, ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr and Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. For a band often dismissed as Top Shop to New Order's Armani, the Basildon quartet were emerging as first among equals at this gathering of electro-pop titans.
Backstage, spirits were high and liquid Ecstasy flowed freely. "I got completely and utterly fucked up on the first night," recalls Bernard Sumner later. "There was a shower in the dressing room and I just filled it with puke. It was the worst fucking moment of my life."
Travelling by private charter plane and cushioned by a huge entourage, the Mode's own appetite for excess now took on premier league dimensions. "I wouldn't say the tour was any more intense than at many other times," argues Alan Wilder. "Tickets were selling like hot cakes and we were enjoying ourselves. There was a lot of Ecstasy around, but I couldn't say that anybody was adversely affected by that. Apparently, Dave was using heroin, but this wasn't obvious in his performances, and there was the usual amount of drinking and frivolity. It was a long tour and maybe there was a delayed reaction, with the cracks appearing later."
Gahan's marriage to Joanne had unravelled and he fell for his new love, American publicist Teresa Conway, on the World Violation tour. After the tour, in April 1992, Gahan and Conway married at an Elvis-themed Las Vegas chapel. Dave settled in LA, leaving behind a wife and young son. Ominously, his own father had done exactly the same thing.
"That was always tormenting me," Gahan says. "It was like I was walking away from something that really was a part of me and I really wanted to nurture in my life. I guess I felt fucked up over that for a while, and trying to drown the feelings. But I spent more time trying to drown the feelings than actively getting off my ass and doing something, which would have been the right thing to do."
Adrift in LA, Gahan drowned his feelings of exile and inadequacy with drugs. Like dozens of exiled Brits before him, LA became the singers fantasy rock-star theme park. Huge success and wealth only deepened the problem. Waster or not, he could get into any party, club or crack house.
"I went along for the ride and got carried away with it," Dave nods. "The problem with that is the idea became much bigger than the person, the character got out of control. So then, even when we weren't touring, I sort of felt like I had some kind of image to live up to. I wasn't making any music - I might pick up a guitar now and again and have a pathetic attempt, a terrible jam when my mates were round. But other than that it was just playing the part."
When the Mode reconvened in Madrid in March 1992 to record the sequel to Violator, the shit finally hit the fan. By setting up a makeshift studio in an opulent villa half an hour outside the city, the four members hoped the energy of living together would generate creative chemistry. In reality, after a year apart, the isolated location only magnified the widening gulf between them.
Violator was produced by relative newcomer Mark 'Flood' Ellis, who would later work with U2 and Nick Cave, then given a sleekly contemporary mix by disco veteran Francois Kevorkian. It became a huge transatlantic hit in March 1990, spawning a slew of Top 10 singles, including the techno-glam stomp of 'Personal Jesus' and the sleek, mournful disco lament, 'Enjoy The Silence'. For the first time in the band's career, critical and commercial success came hand in hand.
'Personal Jesus' became a million-selling US single after MTV removed a shot from Anton Corbijn's video, apparently on the grounds of implied bestiality. "The shot of the horse's arse comes when there's all this heavy breathing on the track," explains an incredulous Martin Gore. "I don't know if Anton was consciously trying to be perverted, I think it was more coincidental that it happened at that point. These video people see things very strangely."
As newly crowned godfathers of the burgeoning 'alternative' scene, the Mode embarked on the 75-date World Violation tour to promote the album. In June, they filled two nights at LA's Dodgers Stadium. As support, they invited the newly formed Electronic, featuring New Order's Bernard Sumner, ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr and Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. For a band often dismissed as Top Shop to New Order's Armani, the Basildon quartet were emerging as first among equals at this gathering of electro-pop titans.
Backstage, spirits were high and liquid Ecstasy flowed freely. "I got completely and utterly fucked up on the first night," recalls Bernard Sumner later. "There was a shower in the dressing room and I just filled it with puke. It was the worst fucking moment of my life."
Travelling by private charter plane and cushioned by a huge entourage, the Mode's own appetite for excess now took on premier league dimensions. "I wouldn't say the tour was any more intense than at many other times," argues Alan Wilder. "Tickets were selling like hot cakes and we were enjoying ourselves. There was a lot of Ecstasy around, but I couldn't say that anybody was adversely affected by that. Apparently, Dave was using heroin, but this wasn't obvious in his performances, and there was the usual amount of drinking and frivolity. It was a long tour and maybe there was a delayed reaction, with the cracks appearing later."
Gahan's marriage to Joanne had unravelled and he fell for his new love, American publicist Teresa Conway, on the World Violation tour. After the tour, in April 1992, Gahan and Conway married at an Elvis-themed Las Vegas chapel. Dave settled in LA, leaving behind a wife and young son. Ominously, his own father had done exactly the same thing.
"That was always tormenting me," Gahan says. "It was like I was walking away from something that really was a part of me and I really wanted to nurture in my life. I guess I felt fucked up over that for a while, and trying to drown the feelings. But I spent more time trying to drown the feelings than actively getting off my ass and doing something, which would have been the right thing to do."
Adrift in LA, Gahan drowned his feelings of exile and inadequacy with drugs. Like dozens of exiled Brits before him, LA became the singers fantasy rock-star theme park. Huge success and wealth only deepened the problem. Waster or not, he could get into any party, club or crack house.
"I went along for the ride and got carried away with it," Dave nods. "The problem with that is the idea became much bigger than the person, the character got out of control. So then, even when we weren't touring, I sort of felt like I had some kind of image to live up to. I wasn't making any music - I might pick up a guitar now and again and have a pathetic attempt, a terrible jam when my mates were round. But other than that it was just playing the part."
When the Mode reconvened in Madrid in March 1992 to record the sequel to Violator, the shit finally hit the fan. By setting up a makeshift studio in an opulent villa half an hour outside the city, the four members hoped the energy of living together would generate creative chemistry. In reality, after a year apart, the isolated location only magnified the widening gulf between them.
Last edited:
"Dave had changed," Fletch nods. "We hadn't seen him for eight or nine months. He'd grown his hair long and he was talking about these bands we hadn't really heard of."
Inspired by the emergent grunge scene, Gahan pushed for a more gritty feel to Songs Of Faith And Devotion. "I was determined that we should be trying to do new things and be something we weren't," he says, "and not become this stereotypical band who put out the same stuff all the time. I was pushing to be heavier, to give us a rockier feel. I wanted to combine both things and I didn't feel like that had been done properly yet. There were a few bands at the time, like Nine Inch Nails and Nitzer Ebb, with that harder and bluesier edge. I wanted to RARRRRRK!! And to be honest, I kind of got my own way."
For the first time in Mode history, tracks on Songs Of Faith And Devotion evolved via studio jam sessions. Then Alan Wilder and producer Flood would tackle the 'screwdriver' work. But Gahan's passion for hard rock was more than merely cosmetic. He was living the self-destructive myth to the hilt.
"Dave was taking a lot of heroin at the time," says Gore, "which took me a while to realise. I'm not a drug expert, I don't know all the symptoms. But he was disappearing into his room all the time - we wouldn't see him sometimes for three days. And at the same time, I felt totally distanced from the rest of the band, I really didn't want to be there. Up until that point we always felt like a gang - then suddenly it felt really wrong for the first time."
The three-month Madrid sessions proved disastrous. The band scarcely communicated or socialised together. Gore became withdrawn, boozed heavily and spent days playing Sonic The Hedgehog. Gahan retreated to his room to paint, play guitar and shoot up. Meanwhile, relations between Fletch and Wilder collapsed, highlighting faultlines in the warped democracy of Depeche Mode which would eventually split the band completely.
"Alan really didn't get on with Andy," Gore explains. "We've always been honest about the fact that Andy's not really musical - when we play live we give him parts to play, but it's not exactly taxing. And Alan around that time was heavily involved with what made Depeche Mode, in production and arrangement. I think he felt that it was wrong that he was making the same money as Andy, who basically doesn't do anything in the studio."
After a few weeks, Daniel Miller arrived to check on progress. "It was such a bad vibe," he recalls. "Nothing was happening, nobody was communicating, Alan was off playing drums with headphones on, Fletch was reading the paper, Flood was trying to get some sound without anyone really helping him. The engineer had his feet up on the desk and was half asleep. It was like, what the fuck? This is the beginning of the album, it should be a really exciting time."
Although Miller was generally shielded from the band's drug use, Gahan's ravaged state was too obvious to miss. "He used to do this great impersonation of a rock casualty," Miller sighs, "but he fell into the character. It was very hard to communicate with him. Dave is one of the funniest people I know, but he completely lost his sense of humour and his ability to laugh at himself."
Gahan admits, "I could no longer poke fun at it because I'd look in the mirror and that was me. Yeah, I did lose my sense of humour. drugs will do that to you. They're not very funny. You lose your sense of anything."
Even Gahan's closest ally in Depeche Mode, Alan Wilder, became exasperated with the singer. During a rare group night out in a Madrid bar, Wilder witnessed Gahan start a "totally unprovoked" fight with a gang of Hell's Angels.
"From what I recall," Wilder remembers, "Dave took offence at being 'looked at' and made it known in the strongest possible terms to the largest and grisliest looking of the bunch. Flood, Daryl and I looked at each other with a collective 'Oh fuck, here we go...' as all the Angels left the bar. It was fairly obvious what was coming. Sure enough, as soon as we stepped out of the door when the bar closed, we were attacked. I think Dave, Daryl and Martin came off worst although the calibre of our defence was difficult for me to gauge since, being a born coward, I hung back and miraculously remained unscathed apart from suffering acute embarrassment. As the old adage goes, 'You can take the boys out of Basildon but...'"
Inspired by the emergent grunge scene, Gahan pushed for a more gritty feel to Songs Of Faith And Devotion. "I was determined that we should be trying to do new things and be something we weren't," he says, "and not become this stereotypical band who put out the same stuff all the time. I was pushing to be heavier, to give us a rockier feel. I wanted to combine both things and I didn't feel like that had been done properly yet. There were a few bands at the time, like Nine Inch Nails and Nitzer Ebb, with that harder and bluesier edge. I wanted to RARRRRRK!! And to be honest, I kind of got my own way."
For the first time in Mode history, tracks on Songs Of Faith And Devotion evolved via studio jam sessions. Then Alan Wilder and producer Flood would tackle the 'screwdriver' work. But Gahan's passion for hard rock was more than merely cosmetic. He was living the self-destructive myth to the hilt.
"Dave was taking a lot of heroin at the time," says Gore, "which took me a while to realise. I'm not a drug expert, I don't know all the symptoms. But he was disappearing into his room all the time - we wouldn't see him sometimes for three days. And at the same time, I felt totally distanced from the rest of the band, I really didn't want to be there. Up until that point we always felt like a gang - then suddenly it felt really wrong for the first time."
The three-month Madrid sessions proved disastrous. The band scarcely communicated or socialised together. Gore became withdrawn, boozed heavily and spent days playing Sonic The Hedgehog. Gahan retreated to his room to paint, play guitar and shoot up. Meanwhile, relations between Fletch and Wilder collapsed, highlighting faultlines in the warped democracy of Depeche Mode which would eventually split the band completely.
"Alan really didn't get on with Andy," Gore explains. "We've always been honest about the fact that Andy's not really musical - when we play live we give him parts to play, but it's not exactly taxing. And Alan around that time was heavily involved with what made Depeche Mode, in production and arrangement. I think he felt that it was wrong that he was making the same money as Andy, who basically doesn't do anything in the studio."
After a few weeks, Daniel Miller arrived to check on progress. "It was such a bad vibe," he recalls. "Nothing was happening, nobody was communicating, Alan was off playing drums with headphones on, Fletch was reading the paper, Flood was trying to get some sound without anyone really helping him. The engineer had his feet up on the desk and was half asleep. It was like, what the fuck? This is the beginning of the album, it should be a really exciting time."
Although Miller was generally shielded from the band's drug use, Gahan's ravaged state was too obvious to miss. "He used to do this great impersonation of a rock casualty," Miller sighs, "but he fell into the character. It was very hard to communicate with him. Dave is one of the funniest people I know, but he completely lost his sense of humour and his ability to laugh at himself."
Gahan admits, "I could no longer poke fun at it because I'd look in the mirror and that was me. Yeah, I did lose my sense of humour. drugs will do that to you. They're not very funny. You lose your sense of anything."
Even Gahan's closest ally in Depeche Mode, Alan Wilder, became exasperated with the singer. During a rare group night out in a Madrid bar, Wilder witnessed Gahan start a "totally unprovoked" fight with a gang of Hell's Angels.
"From what I recall," Wilder remembers, "Dave took offence at being 'looked at' and made it known in the strongest possible terms to the largest and grisliest looking of the bunch. Flood, Daryl and I looked at each other with a collective 'Oh fuck, here we go...' as all the Angels left the bar. It was fairly obvious what was coming. Sure enough, as soon as we stepped out of the door when the bar closed, we were attacked. I think Dave, Daryl and Martin came off worst although the calibre of our defence was difficult for me to gauge since, being a born coward, I hung back and miraculously remained unscathed apart from suffering acute embarrassment. As the old adage goes, 'You can take the boys out of Basildon but...'"
Wilder says Gahan's increasingly erratic, macho behaviour became "an added pressure in an already quite tense group relationship. A distance formed which I found sad, considering what an enthusiastic and vital person he really is. Dave also has a very generous, open nature but therein lies the problem maybe - and yes, of course everyone tried to help him in their own way, but I don't think any of us had a clue how to go about it."
Gahan's new mood was partly rooted in insecurity about his role in Depeche Mode, and impatience with the band's defiantly non-rock image. "I wanted to give us a real leader, a real front person," he says. 'I didn't think we had any character to what we were doing. I thought that Martin wrote some great songs, but we went about it in a very nerdy way, and it wasn't really me."
But for all the friction it caused, the singer's new hard-rock agenda also catalysed a new chapter in the band's sound. The surging electro-gospel anthem 'Condemnation', for example, would become an instant Mode classic.
"That was the one song where I really sang my heart out," Gahan nods. "I really felt connected to something. It still totally moves me. It was almost touching on what I wanted to do, but I didn't have the energy or I wasn't there enough to really follow it through. I'd come in with these sporadic ideas and emotions but I wasn't there to follow it through. It was really Alan and Flood sitting there at the desk."
After a healing break, the album sessions relocated to Hamburg. These, Alan Wilder recalls, were far more productive. "By the time we started the Hamburg sessions in an altogether more suitable commercial studio, we had remembered that less people hanging around equalled more work done. Fletch went back to England and booked himself back into The Priory. Dave only really showed up to do his vocals, and that left myself, Flood and Martin - who perked up a bit - to get on and knock the album into shape."
Gore was still binge drinking in Hamburg, at one point reportedly sinking 67 beers in a single 11-hour marathon. But temporarily, at least, he managed to smooth over his friction with Wilder. With Fletch out of the way, Wilder loosened up and socialised with Gore.
Finally completed on New Year's Eve 1992, Songs Of Faith And Devotion began its rise to million-selling success by topping the UK charts in March 1993. It became a landmark Depeche Mode album even though Gahan, Gore and Daniel Miller have all since branded the final mix a flawed dilution of their original intent. Forged from shattered friendships and wracked emotions, these songs of hate and implosion almost finished the band for good.
"There was a struggle on that album - all of a sudden, after all these years together, we were becoming very separate individually," says Gahan. "The hardest job of all was probably for Flood, pulling it all together. I think that album virtually destroyed him, too. He's worked with Nick Cave and U2 and everyone, but he said to me afterwards that the darkest album he's ever worked on was Songs Of Faith And Devotion. It's amazing that we managed to pull through all that. I think there's a something about Depeche Mode that's much bigger than any of us individually. It's like some Mafia that we created for ourselves."
The Mode survived their darkest album to date. That which did not kill them had left them stronger, or so they believed. But the monstrously excessive tour which followed would push them to the brink of total breakdown.
During the first quarter of 1993, the Mode frantically cleared the decks for their biggest ever world tour - a potentially ruinous 156 dates over 15 months. Despite deepening depressions, Fletch married his long-term girlfriend Grainne on 16 January. Dave, meanwhile, was pumping himself up physically with marathon circuit training, and spent 10 hours acquiring a new winged tattoo for the tour. Neither of these rituals would protect him from the chemical chaos ahead.
With a travelling staff of 120 people, including both a drug dealer and a psychiatrist, Gahan described the Devotional tour as "like taking a mental asylum on the road". Given that it included heart-attacks, alcoholic seizures, overdoses, sinister vampire fantasies and rumoured backstage orgies, the Devotional tour has inevitably assumed legend status.
"Most of the stories have an element of truth about them," Wilder admits. "Everyone was indulging in their own thing, sometimes with destructive results, but that's all part of the private way you deal with such a bizarre and unreal world. When I look back, it seems incredible that we paid an on-the-road psychiatrist $4,000 per week to listen to our ramblings - something I think I instigated. The idea was that he could provide some kind of support for those people who wanted it - although the real reason was to try to persuade Dave to come off smack because we weren't confident he was going to make it to the end of the tour. Ironically, I think everybody went to see the shrink at some point apart from Dave, who was far too wise to the scheme."
Reporters who witnessed the tour returned with stories of superhuman sex and drug binges. Of roadies who would "pick out the 15 or 20 most beautiful girls in the crowd, evidently for the Mode's pleasure." Of Dave Gahan thronged by "drug barons" and groupies in "fishnets and stockings, incapable of even putting their lipstick on straight". Of "porn-themed" VIP areas awash with half-naked beauties. Other insiders hinted at stranger antics still, of S&M harnesses and hotel mini-bars deployed in novel but possibly illegal ways. Much of it rumour and speculation, of course.
"Everything turns into myth," sighs Martin Gore. "It never was an orgy, it wasn't completely out of control all the time. We wouldn't have survived if it really had taken on the epic proportions that everybody speaks about..." Really? That's a shame. "That also gives me a get-out," laughs Martin.
Gahan's new mood was partly rooted in insecurity about his role in Depeche Mode, and impatience with the band's defiantly non-rock image. "I wanted to give us a real leader, a real front person," he says. 'I didn't think we had any character to what we were doing. I thought that Martin wrote some great songs, but we went about it in a very nerdy way, and it wasn't really me."
But for all the friction it caused, the singer's new hard-rock agenda also catalysed a new chapter in the band's sound. The surging electro-gospel anthem 'Condemnation', for example, would become an instant Mode classic.
"That was the one song where I really sang my heart out," Gahan nods. "I really felt connected to something. It still totally moves me. It was almost touching on what I wanted to do, but I didn't have the energy or I wasn't there enough to really follow it through. I'd come in with these sporadic ideas and emotions but I wasn't there to follow it through. It was really Alan and Flood sitting there at the desk."
After a healing break, the album sessions relocated to Hamburg. These, Alan Wilder recalls, were far more productive. "By the time we started the Hamburg sessions in an altogether more suitable commercial studio, we had remembered that less people hanging around equalled more work done. Fletch went back to England and booked himself back into The Priory. Dave only really showed up to do his vocals, and that left myself, Flood and Martin - who perked up a bit - to get on and knock the album into shape."
Gore was still binge drinking in Hamburg, at one point reportedly sinking 67 beers in a single 11-hour marathon. But temporarily, at least, he managed to smooth over his friction with Wilder. With Fletch out of the way, Wilder loosened up and socialised with Gore.
Finally completed on New Year's Eve 1992, Songs Of Faith And Devotion began its rise to million-selling success by topping the UK charts in March 1993. It became a landmark Depeche Mode album even though Gahan, Gore and Daniel Miller have all since branded the final mix a flawed dilution of their original intent. Forged from shattered friendships and wracked emotions, these songs of hate and implosion almost finished the band for good.
"There was a struggle on that album - all of a sudden, after all these years together, we were becoming very separate individually," says Gahan. "The hardest job of all was probably for Flood, pulling it all together. I think that album virtually destroyed him, too. He's worked with Nick Cave and U2 and everyone, but he said to me afterwards that the darkest album he's ever worked on was Songs Of Faith And Devotion. It's amazing that we managed to pull through all that. I think there's a something about Depeche Mode that's much bigger than any of us individually. It's like some Mafia that we created for ourselves."
The Mode survived their darkest album to date. That which did not kill them had left them stronger, or so they believed. But the monstrously excessive tour which followed would push them to the brink of total breakdown.
During the first quarter of 1993, the Mode frantically cleared the decks for their biggest ever world tour - a potentially ruinous 156 dates over 15 months. Despite deepening depressions, Fletch married his long-term girlfriend Grainne on 16 January. Dave, meanwhile, was pumping himself up physically with marathon circuit training, and spent 10 hours acquiring a new winged tattoo for the tour. Neither of these rituals would protect him from the chemical chaos ahead.
With a travelling staff of 120 people, including both a drug dealer and a psychiatrist, Gahan described the Devotional tour as "like taking a mental asylum on the road". Given that it included heart-attacks, alcoholic seizures, overdoses, sinister vampire fantasies and rumoured backstage orgies, the Devotional tour has inevitably assumed legend status.
"Most of the stories have an element of truth about them," Wilder admits. "Everyone was indulging in their own thing, sometimes with destructive results, but that's all part of the private way you deal with such a bizarre and unreal world. When I look back, it seems incredible that we paid an on-the-road psychiatrist $4,000 per week to listen to our ramblings - something I think I instigated. The idea was that he could provide some kind of support for those people who wanted it - although the real reason was to try to persuade Dave to come off smack because we weren't confident he was going to make it to the end of the tour. Ironically, I think everybody went to see the shrink at some point apart from Dave, who was far too wise to the scheme."
Reporters who witnessed the tour returned with stories of superhuman sex and drug binges. Of roadies who would "pick out the 15 or 20 most beautiful girls in the crowd, evidently for the Mode's pleasure." Of Dave Gahan thronged by "drug barons" and groupies in "fishnets and stockings, incapable of even putting their lipstick on straight". Of "porn-themed" VIP areas awash with half-naked beauties. Other insiders hinted at stranger antics still, of S&M harnesses and hotel mini-bars deployed in novel but possibly illegal ways. Much of it rumour and speculation, of course.
"Everything turns into myth," sighs Martin Gore. "It never was an orgy, it wasn't completely out of control all the time. We wouldn't have survived if it really had taken on the epic proportions that everybody speaks about..." Really? That's a shame. "That also gives me a get-out," laughs Martin.
Alan Wilder agrees that "the myth that has been building up around the Devotional tour now seems to be fully out of control. In actual fact, it wasn't really any more 'rock 'n' roll' than other Depeche Mode tours over the years - everyone had their own little 'on tour' world which existed alongside a professionally run live show. It was just longer than the others and had been subsequently better documented. The well-oiled machine meant that, quite often, our paths wouldn't even cross, apart from the two hours on stage."
Gore recalls, "There were different levels of debauchery for all the different members of the band. I really don't think I was particularly bad during the Devotional tour, I think I was worse on the World Violation tour. That was the end of the acid times, there was a lot of Ecstasy still flying around. But by the time of the Devotional tour I couldn't cope with that - mentally more than physically. I had to choose my moments."
For Fletch, too, the Devotional tour only magnified his existing problems. "It was horrible," he says. "Things spiralling out of control, the excess got worse and worse. All of us had quite big personal problems for a long time because of that tour. There was a lot of drugs doing the rounds. It was very debauched, but I was going through a rocky patch, so I wasn't so much into that. I had my own problems, which made it 10 times worse."
Support bands had a hard time on the tour. Spiritualized were sent for an early bath after a handful of dates. Then Mute labelmates Miranda Sex Garden were pelted with rotten meat and dogshit during their warm-up set. [1] Despite this, they bonded with the Mode and violinist Hepzibah Sessa would later become Alan Wilder's long-term girlfriend.
By now, Gahan was in full-on Muppet Michael Hutchence mode. Prowling a giant futuristic stage set conceived by Anton Corbijn, the singer became consumed by his crotch-grabbing techno-grunge messiah caricature. But backstage he would hide from his fellow band members in a private party room adorned with candles and rugs. Communications soon collapsed.
"It was different limos, different hotel floors," sighs Daniel Miller. "I don't think anyone spoke to Dave the whole tour. They saw Dave on stage and Dave went off into his dressing room and his candles and everything. Alan wasn't really talking to Martin and Fletch. Obviously it was very sad in some ways. But if you saw the funny side, the ridiculous side, it was Spinal Tap, too."
Gore says, "Dave and Alan had their own separate limos. Me and Andy always travelled in the same car." He also argues that separate hotel floors were a practical necessity in case individual band members threw raucous parties - like the Berlin aftershow, which ended with a police raid and a permanent ban from the Intercontinental hotel.
In Mannheim, Gahan stage-dived into an ocean of grabbing hands of fans and was almost torn limb from limb. The singer would later blame these crowd-surfing antics for the ever-increasing number of scars on his forearms. At the Crystal palace show in London on July 31, where the Mode played to 30,000 people, NME's Gavin Martin noted Gahan's wracked state: "His skin is sickly grey, his eyes sunk into bluish sockets. The insides of his long skinny arms are all bruised and scratched."
Band relations were now at crisis point. Gahan was branded "The C***" by his fellow Mode members. Meetings would end in fisticuffs. A late summer hiatus gave the quartet a cooling-off period while they prepared a live concert video and shot a promo for 'Condemnation", directed by Anton Corbijn. But when the tour's initial North American leg opened, in Canada on September 8, the madness began anew with the arrest of Gahan and his old Basildon buddy Daryl Bamonte following a hotel fracas. The singer had punched a concierge in the mouth during a power cut, and spent the night behind bars.
As the Mode progressed across the US, their hedonism took several dark turns. On October 5, in New Orleans, Gahan was stretchered away to hospital after his mid-show heart-attack. "I was told by the doctor that maybe I should continue the rest of the tour on a stool," Dave nods, "as my heart probably wouldn't take it. I looked at my manager and said 'I can't do that!' So we cancelled the next show, I got one day off, and then just carried on."
The tragicomic excess of the Devotional tour escalated, with three day parties punctuated by scarifying flights which left band members praying for their lives. In late November, in an ominous portent of Gahan's later problems at the same venue, Gore collapsed at the Sunset Marquis hotel in Hollywood.
"I didn't eat anything that day," he recalls. "We were shooting a video a couple of days before that happened and I went straight from the video shoot into a bar, and started drinking. Then I went on to a club, met some guy who gave me some stuff, so I was up all night until probably 9 or 10 in the morning. We had a band meeting at 12 o'clock and I managed to sleep for about an hour. The I got up and I've never felt so dreadful in my life. I managed to literally crawl to this meeting, I had to lay on the floor just saying 'Yes' or 'No', that was all I could muster. At some point, I tried to get up and went into convulsions caused by alcohol and drug withdrawal."
Gore recalls, "There were different levels of debauchery for all the different members of the band. I really don't think I was particularly bad during the Devotional tour, I think I was worse on the World Violation tour. That was the end of the acid times, there was a lot of Ecstasy still flying around. But by the time of the Devotional tour I couldn't cope with that - mentally more than physically. I had to choose my moments."
For Fletch, too, the Devotional tour only magnified his existing problems. "It was horrible," he says. "Things spiralling out of control, the excess got worse and worse. All of us had quite big personal problems for a long time because of that tour. There was a lot of drugs doing the rounds. It was very debauched, but I was going through a rocky patch, so I wasn't so much into that. I had my own problems, which made it 10 times worse."
Support bands had a hard time on the tour. Spiritualized were sent for an early bath after a handful of dates. Then Mute labelmates Miranda Sex Garden were pelted with rotten meat and dogshit during their warm-up set. [1] Despite this, they bonded with the Mode and violinist Hepzibah Sessa would later become Alan Wilder's long-term girlfriend.
By now, Gahan was in full-on Muppet Michael Hutchence mode. Prowling a giant futuristic stage set conceived by Anton Corbijn, the singer became consumed by his crotch-grabbing techno-grunge messiah caricature. But backstage he would hide from his fellow band members in a private party room adorned with candles and rugs. Communications soon collapsed.
"It was different limos, different hotel floors," sighs Daniel Miller. "I don't think anyone spoke to Dave the whole tour. They saw Dave on stage and Dave went off into his dressing room and his candles and everything. Alan wasn't really talking to Martin and Fletch. Obviously it was very sad in some ways. But if you saw the funny side, the ridiculous side, it was Spinal Tap, too."
Gore says, "Dave and Alan had their own separate limos. Me and Andy always travelled in the same car." He also argues that separate hotel floors were a practical necessity in case individual band members threw raucous parties - like the Berlin aftershow, which ended with a police raid and a permanent ban from the Intercontinental hotel.
In Mannheim, Gahan stage-dived into an ocean of grabbing hands of fans and was almost torn limb from limb. The singer would later blame these crowd-surfing antics for the ever-increasing number of scars on his forearms. At the Crystal palace show in London on July 31, where the Mode played to 30,000 people, NME's Gavin Martin noted Gahan's wracked state: "His skin is sickly grey, his eyes sunk into bluish sockets. The insides of his long skinny arms are all bruised and scratched."
Band relations were now at crisis point. Gahan was branded "The C***" by his fellow Mode members. Meetings would end in fisticuffs. A late summer hiatus gave the quartet a cooling-off period while they prepared a live concert video and shot a promo for 'Condemnation", directed by Anton Corbijn. But when the tour's initial North American leg opened, in Canada on September 8, the madness began anew with the arrest of Gahan and his old Basildon buddy Daryl Bamonte following a hotel fracas. The singer had punched a concierge in the mouth during a power cut, and spent the night behind bars.
As the Mode progressed across the US, their hedonism took several dark turns. On October 5, in New Orleans, Gahan was stretchered away to hospital after his mid-show heart-attack. "I was told by the doctor that maybe I should continue the rest of the tour on a stool," Dave nods, "as my heart probably wouldn't take it. I looked at my manager and said 'I can't do that!' So we cancelled the next show, I got one day off, and then just carried on."
The tragicomic excess of the Devotional tour escalated, with three day parties punctuated by scarifying flights which left band members praying for their lives. In late November, in an ominous portent of Gahan's later problems at the same venue, Gore collapsed at the Sunset Marquis hotel in Hollywood.
"I didn't eat anything that day," he recalls. "We were shooting a video a couple of days before that happened and I went straight from the video shoot into a bar, and started drinking. Then I went on to a club, met some guy who gave me some stuff, so I was up all night until probably 9 or 10 in the morning. We had a band meeting at 12 o'clock and I managed to sleep for about an hour. The I got up and I've never felt so dreadful in my life. I managed to literally crawl to this meeting, I had to lay on the floor just saying 'Yes' or 'No', that was all I could muster. At some point, I tried to get up and went into convulsions caused by alcohol and drug withdrawal."
Gore recognised the symptoms. "That wasn't the first time," he confesses. "It happened two weeks previously, but I didn't know because I was on my own. I suddenly woke up and couldn't remember where I was...it was a real warning to me."
A month later, Gore was arrested and fined in a Denver hotel for disturbing the peace at a drunken hotel party. The tour then moved on to Asia and Australia and beyond. In South Africa, Alan Wilder was hospitalised with kidney stones. Meanwhile, Fletch's behaviour became increasingly erratic. Approached by an autograph hunter in a Johannesburg sports bar, he replied, "Did you call me a c*** mate?" After learning that a shooting involving the same group of people had occurred there just the night before, the band were hurriedly smuggled out the back door.
Soon afterwards, a severely depressed Fletch quit the Devotional tour, flew home, checked into hospital and swore never to play with Alan Wilder again. He was replaced by Gahan's touring buddy Daryl Bamonte after a week of coaching from Wilder.
While the Mode thundered through South America, word came through of Kurt Cobain's suicide. "I was pissed off," Gahan later admitted. "I felt like he'd stolen my idea."
With hindsight, the Mode admit that their final 1994 lap of America with Primal Scream was probably a mistake. Gahan pushed for the Primals as support: "I wanted us to swing like that, to be that loose." Fletch was in hospital by this point, but had serious fears for his colleagues.
"I wasn't in favour of doing a second American leg," he says. "I think it was probably bad news for the Primals more than Depeche. I don't even think they realised the state everyone was in at that point. I think they were shocked. The length of the tour was a mistake. That's why now we'll only commit to tours half or a third that size. It was a mistake - after the Violator period we thought we were kings, we thought we could tackle anything. And unfortunately, we couldn't."
Primals keyboard player Martin Duffy remembers the shows as "monotonous" and "soul destroying", playing to arenas full of indifferent Mode fans munching on take-out pizzas. Duffy claims, "I think we did more positive work for Depeche Mode than we did for Primal Scream. We got the band back together. They weren't speaking to each other before we went on the tour."
At one of the June Primals shows, at Jones Beach, Long Island, a deeply intoxicated Dave Gahan bit British reporter Andrew Perry on the neck. Perry was backstage in Primal Scream's party room, where he spotted the singer "shovelling coke up his nose". Gahan burbled away at Perry, then chomped his neck, vowed to "put a curse" on him, and stormed out.
"I remember reading about it afterwards but I don't really remember doing it," Gahan laughs. "I think I had some strange fascination at the time with vampires. In all seriousness, I was really starting to move into this place where I really believed what I was creating. I definitely could have been a vampire, in my own head. Even the bed that I slept in in Los Angeles was in the shape of a coffin - a huge double bed shaped like a coffin! Ha, ha! My whole life was Spinal Tap at that time..."
On the tour's last night, at Deer Park Music Center in Indianapolis on July 8, Gahan took another near-fatal dive into the crowd. He plunged 12 feet, smashed his shoulder against a row of seats, and was stretchered off to hospital. It took a day for him to sober up and realise he had two cracked ribs. By now an emaciated junkie, he checked out and disappeared with wife Teresa to a cabin near Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The singer was alive - but only just.
The Devotional tour ended with all of the Mode in emotional shreds, in a chemical haze, or in hospital. Within months, the band would disintegrate and Dave Gahan would come close to full-on annihilation. Incredibly, their darkest hour was yet to come.
The months following the Devotional meltdown should have been a time for healing, but instead they threw up fresh break-ups and breakdowns. In late August, Martin Gore married his Texan girlfriend Suzanne Boisvert. Dave Gahan, who had jammed with Primal Scream at the Reading Festival, arrived at the wedding party in the small hours with several Scream members in tow. Then he slipped away, back to his L.A. twilight.
Alan Wilder split up from his wife and set off on holiday with Hepzibah Sessa. On September 1, the couple witnessed a shockingly macabre incident near the placid shores of Loch Earn in central Scotland. As they admired the view, an RAF Tornado smashed into the ground barely 200 yards away, showering Wilder's open-topped car with debris.
A month later, Gore was arrested and fined in a Denver hotel for disturbing the peace at a drunken hotel party. The tour then moved on to Asia and Australia and beyond. In South Africa, Alan Wilder was hospitalised with kidney stones. Meanwhile, Fletch's behaviour became increasingly erratic. Approached by an autograph hunter in a Johannesburg sports bar, he replied, "Did you call me a c*** mate?" After learning that a shooting involving the same group of people had occurred there just the night before, the band were hurriedly smuggled out the back door.
Soon afterwards, a severely depressed Fletch quit the Devotional tour, flew home, checked into hospital and swore never to play with Alan Wilder again. He was replaced by Gahan's touring buddy Daryl Bamonte after a week of coaching from Wilder.
While the Mode thundered through South America, word came through of Kurt Cobain's suicide. "I was pissed off," Gahan later admitted. "I felt like he'd stolen my idea."
With hindsight, the Mode admit that their final 1994 lap of America with Primal Scream was probably a mistake. Gahan pushed for the Primals as support: "I wanted us to swing like that, to be that loose." Fletch was in hospital by this point, but had serious fears for his colleagues.
"I wasn't in favour of doing a second American leg," he says. "I think it was probably bad news for the Primals more than Depeche. I don't even think they realised the state everyone was in at that point. I think they were shocked. The length of the tour was a mistake. That's why now we'll only commit to tours half or a third that size. It was a mistake - after the Violator period we thought we were kings, we thought we could tackle anything. And unfortunately, we couldn't."
Primals keyboard player Martin Duffy remembers the shows as "monotonous" and "soul destroying", playing to arenas full of indifferent Mode fans munching on take-out pizzas. Duffy claims, "I think we did more positive work for Depeche Mode than we did for Primal Scream. We got the band back together. They weren't speaking to each other before we went on the tour."
At one of the June Primals shows, at Jones Beach, Long Island, a deeply intoxicated Dave Gahan bit British reporter Andrew Perry on the neck. Perry was backstage in Primal Scream's party room, where he spotted the singer "shovelling coke up his nose". Gahan burbled away at Perry, then chomped his neck, vowed to "put a curse" on him, and stormed out.
"I remember reading about it afterwards but I don't really remember doing it," Gahan laughs. "I think I had some strange fascination at the time with vampires. In all seriousness, I was really starting to move into this place where I really believed what I was creating. I definitely could have been a vampire, in my own head. Even the bed that I slept in in Los Angeles was in the shape of a coffin - a huge double bed shaped like a coffin! Ha, ha! My whole life was Spinal Tap at that time..."
On the tour's last night, at Deer Park Music Center in Indianapolis on July 8, Gahan took another near-fatal dive into the crowd. He plunged 12 feet, smashed his shoulder against a row of seats, and was stretchered off to hospital. It took a day for him to sober up and realise he had two cracked ribs. By now an emaciated junkie, he checked out and disappeared with wife Teresa to a cabin near Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The singer was alive - but only just.
The Devotional tour ended with all of the Mode in emotional shreds, in a chemical haze, or in hospital. Within months, the band would disintegrate and Dave Gahan would come close to full-on annihilation. Incredibly, their darkest hour was yet to come.
The months following the Devotional meltdown should have been a time for healing, but instead they threw up fresh break-ups and breakdowns. In late August, Martin Gore married his Texan girlfriend Suzanne Boisvert. Dave Gahan, who had jammed with Primal Scream at the Reading Festival, arrived at the wedding party in the small hours with several Scream members in tow. Then he slipped away, back to his L.A. twilight.
Alan Wilder split up from his wife and set off on holiday with Hepzibah Sessa. On September 1, the couple witnessed a shockingly macabre incident near the placid shores of Loch Earn in central Scotland. As they admired the view, an RAF Tornado smashed into the ground barely 200 yards away, showering Wilder's open-topped car with debris.
"It was the surreal quality of the event that I remember most," Wilder says. "The thing that struck me was that such an instantaneous tragedy is immediately followed by the banality of continuing life. As two dead airmen were splattered across the road, the sun shone, the birds sang and no music played. Things were strangely silent afterwards, which was in stark contrast to the noise made by the plane seconds earlier as it shot over our heads. These moments are still very vivid, even now."
Wilder, whose anxiety about flying had been tested to destruction on the Devotional tour, would later immortalise the incident on 'Black Box', a track on last year's lavish Recoil album Liquid. Although active since 1986, Recoil would become Wilder's main musical outlet after he quit Depeche Mode. This momentous decision was finally announced in June 1995. His press statement blamed "increasing dissatisfaction with internal relations and working practices within the group."
Gore cites Wilder's tension with Fletch as key to his decision. But Wilder claims this was "largely immaterial since it made no impact on the important issues like how the records were made or how they were performed. The relationship that never really flourished was between myself and Martin. I felt that it was mainly he who didn't really value the effort I put in, and that disappointed me, because generally we got on OK and I respected his talent as a songwriter. I guess the introverted side of Martin's nature made it difficult for him to show appreciation or hand out praise. That said, it's not something I dwell on. Life is too short to bear grudges and so I have no problems with any members of the group."
As Depeche Mode disintegrated, Dave Gahan surrendered to full-scale heroin addiction in L.A. He had tried detoxing several times since late 1994, but always relapsed. He set aside a closet in his Hollywood home, christened the Blue Room, where he could shoot up in numbed isolation. His relationship with Teresa Conway reached breaking point, and they separated. In a state of wasted paranoia, Dave took to carrying guns. He would even shoot up water purely for the instant buzz, and once awoke in the front garden of a dealer who had literally robbed the shirt off his back. Next week, he went back there to score again.
"It happened a lot more times than I actually thought," says Gahan of overdosing. "Sometimes I would come to and it was two days later, that kind of thing. People start dying, you know - but I never really thought that would happen to me. It was classic drug addict stuff."
One night, during a visit from his mother and son Jack, Gahan passed out from another overdose. On waking and discovering his works had been thrown away, the singer frantically scrambled through his bins. He then locked himself away and shot up. His mother and son burst into the bath-room and found Gahan on the floor. At first he lied, claiming he was injecting steroids for his voice. Eventually, he looked his mother in the eye and admitted, "Mum, I'm a junkie." She replied, "I know, love."
August 1995 was a low point for Gahan. He returned from an Arizona detox centre to find his house had been methodically burgled. The alarm code was reset, prompting suspicion that his drug buddies were teaching him a lesson. Dave put the house up for sale, rented a new place in Santa Monica, then checked himself into the Sunset Marquis hotel. Strung out on smack and Valium, he phoned his mother in Britain. In the middle of the call he went to the bathroom, carved two-inch razor cuts into his wrists, and wrapped a towel around the gushing wounds.
"I don't think I was trying to kill myself," says Gahan today, "I think again I was just crying out for some kind of attention and really going about it in an odd way, it was a mistake. It was feelings of wanting to disappear - still be here, but just floating around."
Wilder, whose anxiety about flying had been tested to destruction on the Devotional tour, would later immortalise the incident on 'Black Box', a track on last year's lavish Recoil album Liquid. Although active since 1986, Recoil would become Wilder's main musical outlet after he quit Depeche Mode. This momentous decision was finally announced in June 1995. His press statement blamed "increasing dissatisfaction with internal relations and working practices within the group."
Gore cites Wilder's tension with Fletch as key to his decision. But Wilder claims this was "largely immaterial since it made no impact on the important issues like how the records were made or how they were performed. The relationship that never really flourished was between myself and Martin. I felt that it was mainly he who didn't really value the effort I put in, and that disappointed me, because generally we got on OK and I respected his talent as a songwriter. I guess the introverted side of Martin's nature made it difficult for him to show appreciation or hand out praise. That said, it's not something I dwell on. Life is too short to bear grudges and so I have no problems with any members of the group."
As Depeche Mode disintegrated, Dave Gahan surrendered to full-scale heroin addiction in L.A. He had tried detoxing several times since late 1994, but always relapsed. He set aside a closet in his Hollywood home, christened the Blue Room, where he could shoot up in numbed isolation. His relationship with Teresa Conway reached breaking point, and they separated. In a state of wasted paranoia, Dave took to carrying guns. He would even shoot up water purely for the instant buzz, and once awoke in the front garden of a dealer who had literally robbed the shirt off his back. Next week, he went back there to score again.
"It happened a lot more times than I actually thought," says Gahan of overdosing. "Sometimes I would come to and it was two days later, that kind of thing. People start dying, you know - but I never really thought that would happen to me. It was classic drug addict stuff."
One night, during a visit from his mother and son Jack, Gahan passed out from another overdose. On waking and discovering his works had been thrown away, the singer frantically scrambled through his bins. He then locked himself away and shot up. His mother and son burst into the bath-room and found Gahan on the floor. At first he lied, claiming he was injecting steroids for his voice. Eventually, he looked his mother in the eye and admitted, "Mum, I'm a junkie." She replied, "I know, love."
August 1995 was a low point for Gahan. He returned from an Arizona detox centre to find his house had been methodically burgled. The alarm code was reset, prompting suspicion that his drug buddies were teaching him a lesson. Dave put the house up for sale, rented a new place in Santa Monica, then checked himself into the Sunset Marquis hotel. Strung out on smack and Valium, he phoned his mother in Britain. In the middle of the call he went to the bathroom, carved two-inch razor cuts into his wrists, and wrapped a towel around the gushing wounds.
"I don't think I was trying to kill myself," says Gahan today, "I think again I was just crying out for some kind of attention and really going about it in an odd way, it was a mistake. It was feelings of wanting to disappear - still be here, but just floating around."
By the time a friend dropped by, noticed Gahan's seeping wounds and dialled 911, the singer was virtually comatose. With no time for anaesthetic, the paramedics stitched up his wrists in the ambulance. He came to next morning in a straitjacket in a psychiatric ward. "I thought I might be in heaven," Dave later admitted. "This psychiatrist informed me I'd committed a crime under local law by trying to take my own life. Only in fucking L.A., huh?"
Gahan returned to using drugs almost immediately after being discharged. Meanwhile, in London, Gore and Fletch were hesitantly making steps towards the Mode's first post-Alan Wilder album. Bomb The Bass beatmaster Tim Simenon was drafted in as producer, alongside several session musicians, to fill Wilder's studio shoes. Simenon introduced a fluid, trip-hop dynamism to the Depeche sound as epitomised by the malevolent, sabre-toothed groove of "Barrel Of A Gun".
After initial doubts about the band's future, Gore and Fletch were heartened by the sessions. They called Gahan in New York, where he was now involved with a new girlfriend, a reformed drug user who he met in a detox programme. All three agreed to record Dave's vocals at Manhattan's Electric Lady studio in April and May 1996.
But the sessions proved catastrophic. Gahan claimed he was drug-free, but could barely muster a single usable vocal. In mid-May, recording was scrapped and Dave flew back to L.A. . Humiliated and desperate, the singer's self-esteem was in shreds. His job was on the line, his bandmates were insisting he get a vocal coach, and Teresa was suing him for divorce. On top of which, his drug habit was killing him.
"Martin actually rang me up when I went back home to L.A., after all the trouble," says Gahan. "He said, 'Shall we just knock it on the head?' I said, 'Mart, this just so not important to me right now.' It just wasn't relevant to where I was."
Gahan was in a bad way. He began seeing vocal coach Evelyn Halus, then tried recording again in L.A. with Simenon. But his drug use was out of control. In the early hours of May 28, back at the Sunset Marquis, he overdosed on a cocaine and heroin 'speedball' made with a particularly lethal strain of heroin nicknamed Red Rum. [1]
Gazing blankly into his dealer's eyes, Dave suddenly "had a strong feeling that what I was going was very wrong. I remember having a feeling of it was maybe too late - give me another chance. I remember looking right into the eyes of the guy who was with me at the time and I thought: 'Oh fuck, I've really done it this time.' And basically wanting to live. I really had a strong feeling I wanted to live."
A girl who Gahan had just met in the hotel bar was also present. But the dealer, fearing arrest, prevented her from calling an ambulance while he cleared up and fled. By the time the medics arrived Dave had turned blue and gone into cardiac arrest. He was given "the full Pulp Fiction treatment" as his heart stopped on the way to hospital.
Discharged the next morning, Gahan was immediately arrested by the West Hollywood Sheriff's Department for possession of controlled substances found in his home. He was jailed with seven other offenders until manager Jonathan Kessler posted $10,000 bail. Outside, the singer gave a rambling public confession: "My cat's lives are out...it's not a cool thing to be a drug addict." He also apologised to his mum.
Then, incredibly, Gahan went back to the Sunset Marquis and instantly started using again. Friends who dropped by, including former The Word presenter Amanda de Cadenet, felt sure the singer had a death wish. "I wouldn't have been surprised if I got a phone call saying he was dead," nods Fletch. "Various people had tried to speak to him, but it became past that. I think when he got to his lowest level, the only thing he had left was the band."
Martin Gore agrees, "I don't know what else we could have done. I remember something somebody said about going to L.A. and babysitting him, but it wouldn't have worked because Dave was just being really sneaky at that stage. If I'd have moved in with him that would have probably sent him over the edge anyway."
In the end, a few days after his overdose, Gahan was finally persuaded to check into the Exodus Recovery Centre in Marina Del Rey - a rehab clinic whose former clients include Kurt Cobain and James Caan. The gruelling Exodus regime included five days of cold turkey, during which Dave was strapped down as seizures wracked his body. But it worked.
"I made a decision to give it a shot," Gahan nods. "I took some advice from people for the first time, not just with the band but with my personal life. I actually started listening to people who were telling me I couldn't do this any more. And thank God. There is a different way. I knew it was going to be a struggle. I knew it was going to be the hardest thing I ever did in my life."
Daniel Miller says Gahan also had serious practical motives to kick drugs. "The American legal system said he wouldn't get a green card or be allowed back into the country unless he went into rehab and had tests over a period of two years." Miller says. "In the end, his desire first of all to not be chucked out of America and his understanding of what he was doing to himself kind of forced the issue."
Under constant surveillance from Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous counsellors, Dave regained his voice and finally competed the Ultra album sessions. After a legally enforced spell at a 'sober living louse' in L.A. full of fellow ex-addicts, he moved to a giant Central Park apartment in New York.
Ultra was released to high expectations in April 1997, rocketing to Number One in Britain and scoring three million sales globally. Its windswept amalgam of pneumatic hip-hop and gothic soul expanded the Mode sound, although Daniel Miller now calls it a transitional record. "The sound of a band picking up the pieces, trying to figure out where it's going."
During promotional interviews, Gahan was in full-on confessional therapy mode, revisiting his druggy traumas in lurid detail. It made great copy, but Gahan says, "I regret talking about it a lot, actually. I went around telling everyone, whether they wanted to listen to me or not. It's that feeling that you're the only person that's ever been through this, that's how it came across. Sometimes I came away from those interviews feeling, like, worse."
Gahan returned to using drugs almost immediately after being discharged. Meanwhile, in London, Gore and Fletch were hesitantly making steps towards the Mode's first post-Alan Wilder album. Bomb The Bass beatmaster Tim Simenon was drafted in as producer, alongside several session musicians, to fill Wilder's studio shoes. Simenon introduced a fluid, trip-hop dynamism to the Depeche sound as epitomised by the malevolent, sabre-toothed groove of "Barrel Of A Gun".
After initial doubts about the band's future, Gore and Fletch were heartened by the sessions. They called Gahan in New York, where he was now involved with a new girlfriend, a reformed drug user who he met in a detox programme. All three agreed to record Dave's vocals at Manhattan's Electric Lady studio in April and May 1996.
But the sessions proved catastrophic. Gahan claimed he was drug-free, but could barely muster a single usable vocal. In mid-May, recording was scrapped and Dave flew back to L.A. . Humiliated and desperate, the singer's self-esteem was in shreds. His job was on the line, his bandmates were insisting he get a vocal coach, and Teresa was suing him for divorce. On top of which, his drug habit was killing him.
"Martin actually rang me up when I went back home to L.A., after all the trouble," says Gahan. "He said, 'Shall we just knock it on the head?' I said, 'Mart, this just so not important to me right now.' It just wasn't relevant to where I was."
Gahan was in a bad way. He began seeing vocal coach Evelyn Halus, then tried recording again in L.A. with Simenon. But his drug use was out of control. In the early hours of May 28, back at the Sunset Marquis, he overdosed on a cocaine and heroin 'speedball' made with a particularly lethal strain of heroin nicknamed Red Rum. [1]
Gazing blankly into his dealer's eyes, Dave suddenly "had a strong feeling that what I was going was very wrong. I remember having a feeling of it was maybe too late - give me another chance. I remember looking right into the eyes of the guy who was with me at the time and I thought: 'Oh fuck, I've really done it this time.' And basically wanting to live. I really had a strong feeling I wanted to live."
A girl who Gahan had just met in the hotel bar was also present. But the dealer, fearing arrest, prevented her from calling an ambulance while he cleared up and fled. By the time the medics arrived Dave had turned blue and gone into cardiac arrest. He was given "the full Pulp Fiction treatment" as his heart stopped on the way to hospital.
Discharged the next morning, Gahan was immediately arrested by the West Hollywood Sheriff's Department for possession of controlled substances found in his home. He was jailed with seven other offenders until manager Jonathan Kessler posted $10,000 bail. Outside, the singer gave a rambling public confession: "My cat's lives are out...it's not a cool thing to be a drug addict." He also apologised to his mum.
Then, incredibly, Gahan went back to the Sunset Marquis and instantly started using again. Friends who dropped by, including former The Word presenter Amanda de Cadenet, felt sure the singer had a death wish. "I wouldn't have been surprised if I got a phone call saying he was dead," nods Fletch. "Various people had tried to speak to him, but it became past that. I think when he got to his lowest level, the only thing he had left was the band."
Martin Gore agrees, "I don't know what else we could have done. I remember something somebody said about going to L.A. and babysitting him, but it wouldn't have worked because Dave was just being really sneaky at that stage. If I'd have moved in with him that would have probably sent him over the edge anyway."
In the end, a few days after his overdose, Gahan was finally persuaded to check into the Exodus Recovery Centre in Marina Del Rey - a rehab clinic whose former clients include Kurt Cobain and James Caan. The gruelling Exodus regime included five days of cold turkey, during which Dave was strapped down as seizures wracked his body. But it worked.
"I made a decision to give it a shot," Gahan nods. "I took some advice from people for the first time, not just with the band but with my personal life. I actually started listening to people who were telling me I couldn't do this any more. And thank God. There is a different way. I knew it was going to be a struggle. I knew it was going to be the hardest thing I ever did in my life."
Daniel Miller says Gahan also had serious practical motives to kick drugs. "The American legal system said he wouldn't get a green card or be allowed back into the country unless he went into rehab and had tests over a period of two years." Miller says. "In the end, his desire first of all to not be chucked out of America and his understanding of what he was doing to himself kind of forced the issue."
Under constant surveillance from Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous counsellors, Dave regained his voice and finally competed the Ultra album sessions. After a legally enforced spell at a 'sober living louse' in L.A. full of fellow ex-addicts, he moved to a giant Central Park apartment in New York.
Ultra was released to high expectations in April 1997, rocketing to Number One in Britain and scoring three million sales globally. Its windswept amalgam of pneumatic hip-hop and gothic soul expanded the Mode sound, although Daniel Miller now calls it a transitional record. "The sound of a band picking up the pieces, trying to figure out where it's going."
During promotional interviews, Gahan was in full-on confessional therapy mode, revisiting his druggy traumas in lurid detail. It made great copy, but Gahan says, "I regret talking about it a lot, actually. I went around telling everyone, whether they wanted to listen to me or not. It's that feeling that you're the only person that's ever been through this, that's how it came across. Sometimes I came away from those interviews feeling, like, worse."
Fletch agrees. "I know it makes interesting reading, but it was a terrible part of all our lives. It's not something that was done for publicity. The thing is now, touch wood, we do seem to have come through. I honestly believe we're all better people. Heaven knows how we got ourselves into that situation, but the important thing is we do seem to have bounced back."
Nowadays, both Gahan and Gore get their natural highs from running several mornings a week. And Dave takes care to avoid old friends with bad habits. "Most of my friends that I hang out with in N.Y. are people who are choosing to not drink or do drugs any more," he nods. "And most of them are way more creative than the people who I thought were creative, who I was hanging around with. When you're doing drugs, you sit around talking about being creative, but you don't do fuck all."
Does Dave still see this former party posse? "Naaah!" he laughs. "I don't know where they fucking are! They all disappeared as soon as I stopped taking drugs."
Daniel Miller remembers very clearly the day he signed Depeche Mode to Mute. It was, after all, only last year. After nearly two decades of living in sin, the two long-term partners finally tied the knot legally.
Miller calls the contract a "technicality" undertaken purely to suit the band's internal business structure. And while Mute have relied heavily on the Mode in the past to carry them through lean years, he no longer feels dependent on them.
"When we did this contract," he says, "I think they vaguely looked around to see what else might be on offer. Whether they were actually ever seriously going to go, I don't know. We're so embroiled with each other."
All on the cusp of 40, Depeche Mode have now been famous for half their lives. They have sold upwards of 50 million records since debuting in April 1981 with 'Dreaming Of Me'. [1] These days, you don't need to look very far for their musical legacy: Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage, Marilyn Manson - even U2 and Prodigy - have all had their Mode moments. Not bad for a band once derided as a Fisher Price Kraftwerk.
All three surviving members now have wives, children and business interests outside the band - and all could afford to spend the rest of their lives browsing around garden centres, should they wish.
Today, the mood in the Mode camp is up after three years of reconciliation and recovery. In 1998, they embarked on their first drug-free tour, a stripped-down affair promoting their second hits album, Singles 1986-98. Gahan took his addiction counsellor on the road, and nothing stronger than wine was allowed backstage. The shows were generally well-received, a lean and muted throwback to the band's pop roots.
Gore moved to Southern California with his wife last year. It was there that most of the Exciter sessions took place. With Mark Bell's encouragement, Gahan was largely left alone in the studio to complete his tracks - which perhaps explains why they are his most emotive, expansive vocals to date.
"I definitely feel like I'm more right there with it," Gahan nods, "and really contributing something that I'm proud of. There were periods before where I felt a bit outside, like I've got these ideas but no-one wants to hear them anyway so why even bother? Which was stupid. I felt undervalued but it wasn't like I was saying I had more to contribute. I was going about it the wrong way - once again, I was trying to get attention and be noticed."
It may be significant that all three Mode members now live thousands of miles apart. But Fletch insists that the internal friction which made previous recordings so traumatic has been settled.
"We did have a chat together at the start of this album," he says, "and any problems that we had with each other we sorted out. Which is one of the reasons the recording of this album was so successful. Even if you can't hear it on the record, we can say we had a really good time. I must say I didn't think a few years ago that I'd ever be able to say that."
But where would the original new town neurotics be without their frictions, feuds and insecurities? Don't worry, says Fletch, they haven't gone completely. "We still argue," Fletch acknowledges. "We still have those tensions, but a band has to have tensions. It's not like this brilliant, perfect existence. Martin ins one of my top three, top four friends. Dave I'd consider a brother, it's like a family relationship. I don't have to be Dave's best friend to be in a band with him."
"Tensions have been in the band since day one," confirms Daniel Miller. "It's part of the thing that makes Depeche Mode what they are. I can't imagine that some of those things will ever sort themselves out. The real mates in the band are Martin and Fletch, historically. And Vince as well, they all knew each other. Dave was brought in late. The others had grown up together and known each other as kids. It's Bas you see - different parts of Bas."
And so it all comes back to Basildon. To school days and teenage gangs and the bruising brutality of growing up strange in a strange town. You can take the boys out of Essex, but you can't quite take Essex out of the boys.
"Things haven't changed a lot," shrugs Martin Gore, still huddled on the designer couch of a Notting Hill studio. "I got attacked in the street the other day just out here, just a 10 second walk from Portobello Road. Over nothing, like when I was 17. Two guys came along, 5 o'clock in the evening, I was walking along with this American journalist. One of them just said, 'What are you fucking looking at?' Then he came up and kicked me." [2]
Poor Martin. That kind of bullshit must have dogged you all your life.
"No," he says wistfully, "those are the only two times it's ever happened."
Exciter is released next month by Mute, preceded by the single, 'Dream On'
Nowadays, both Gahan and Gore get their natural highs from running several mornings a week. And Dave takes care to avoid old friends with bad habits. "Most of my friends that I hang out with in N.Y. are people who are choosing to not drink or do drugs any more," he nods. "And most of them are way more creative than the people who I thought were creative, who I was hanging around with. When you're doing drugs, you sit around talking about being creative, but you don't do fuck all."
Does Dave still see this former party posse? "Naaah!" he laughs. "I don't know where they fucking are! They all disappeared as soon as I stopped taking drugs."
Daniel Miller remembers very clearly the day he signed Depeche Mode to Mute. It was, after all, only last year. After nearly two decades of living in sin, the two long-term partners finally tied the knot legally.
Miller calls the contract a "technicality" undertaken purely to suit the band's internal business structure. And while Mute have relied heavily on the Mode in the past to carry them through lean years, he no longer feels dependent on them.
"When we did this contract," he says, "I think they vaguely looked around to see what else might be on offer. Whether they were actually ever seriously going to go, I don't know. We're so embroiled with each other."
All on the cusp of 40, Depeche Mode have now been famous for half their lives. They have sold upwards of 50 million records since debuting in April 1981 with 'Dreaming Of Me'. [1] These days, you don't need to look very far for their musical legacy: Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage, Marilyn Manson - even U2 and Prodigy - have all had their Mode moments. Not bad for a band once derided as a Fisher Price Kraftwerk.
All three surviving members now have wives, children and business interests outside the band - and all could afford to spend the rest of their lives browsing around garden centres, should they wish.
Today, the mood in the Mode camp is up after three years of reconciliation and recovery. In 1998, they embarked on their first drug-free tour, a stripped-down affair promoting their second hits album, Singles 1986-98. Gahan took his addiction counsellor on the road, and nothing stronger than wine was allowed backstage. The shows were generally well-received, a lean and muted throwback to the band's pop roots.
Gore moved to Southern California with his wife last year. It was there that most of the Exciter sessions took place. With Mark Bell's encouragement, Gahan was largely left alone in the studio to complete his tracks - which perhaps explains why they are his most emotive, expansive vocals to date.
"I definitely feel like I'm more right there with it," Gahan nods, "and really contributing something that I'm proud of. There were periods before where I felt a bit outside, like I've got these ideas but no-one wants to hear them anyway so why even bother? Which was stupid. I felt undervalued but it wasn't like I was saying I had more to contribute. I was going about it the wrong way - once again, I was trying to get attention and be noticed."
It may be significant that all three Mode members now live thousands of miles apart. But Fletch insists that the internal friction which made previous recordings so traumatic has been settled.
"We did have a chat together at the start of this album," he says, "and any problems that we had with each other we sorted out. Which is one of the reasons the recording of this album was so successful. Even if you can't hear it on the record, we can say we had a really good time. I must say I didn't think a few years ago that I'd ever be able to say that."
But where would the original new town neurotics be without their frictions, feuds and insecurities? Don't worry, says Fletch, they haven't gone completely. "We still argue," Fletch acknowledges. "We still have those tensions, but a band has to have tensions. It's not like this brilliant, perfect existence. Martin ins one of my top three, top four friends. Dave I'd consider a brother, it's like a family relationship. I don't have to be Dave's best friend to be in a band with him."
"Tensions have been in the band since day one," confirms Daniel Miller. "It's part of the thing that makes Depeche Mode what they are. I can't imagine that some of those things will ever sort themselves out. The real mates in the band are Martin and Fletch, historically. And Vince as well, they all knew each other. Dave was brought in late. The others had grown up together and known each other as kids. It's Bas you see - different parts of Bas."
And so it all comes back to Basildon. To school days and teenage gangs and the bruising brutality of growing up strange in a strange town. You can take the boys out of Essex, but you can't quite take Essex out of the boys.
"Things haven't changed a lot," shrugs Martin Gore, still huddled on the designer couch of a Notting Hill studio. "I got attacked in the street the other day just out here, just a 10 second walk from Portobello Road. Over nothing, like when I was 17. Two guys came along, 5 o'clock in the evening, I was walking along with this American journalist. One of them just said, 'What are you fucking looking at?' Then he came up and kicked me." [2]
Poor Martin. That kind of bullshit must have dogged you all your life.
"No," he says wistfully, "those are the only two times it's ever happened."
Exciter is released next month by Mute, preceded by the single, 'Dream On'
ENJOY THE SILENCE: 20 YEARS OF DEPECHE MODE ALBUMS
SPEAK & SPELL
(May 1981, UK 10)
Clipped, zippy, Fisher Price Europop with helium harmonics, hi-NRG beats and a faintly homoerotic subtext. Mellifluous ditties like 'New Life' and 'Boys Say Go' would sound comically slight by the late Eighties, but history has lent this debut an innocent charm. [3]
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Soft Cell, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret; Human League, Dare; Ultravox, Rage In Eden.
A BROKEN FRAME
(September 1982, UK 8)
Vince Clarke's upbeat pop sensibilities still linger but Martin Gore's minor chords and lyrical unease prevail. A stark, early Factory Records feel can't salvage these transitional, uncertain songs.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Duran Duran, Rio; Michael Jackson, Thriller.
CONSTRUCTION TIME AGAIN
(August 1983, UK 6) лл
The arrival of the sampler and Gore's new industrial direction combine into an anthology of totalitarian work songs and satirical observations on pop success - most notably 'Everything Counts'. Ungainly tempos still spoil the broth.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Japan, Oil On Canvas; Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams; Einsturzende Neubaten, Kollaps.
SOME GREAT REWARD
(September 1984, UK 5 / US 51) ллл
Tougher beats and metallic textures abound as Gore conceives his first subversive pop masterpiece in 'Master And Servant', 'Blasphemous Rumours' and the achingly personal piano ballad 'Somebody'. Chunky, funky, mid-Eighties production packs a satisfying punch.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Welcome To The Pleasuredome; Madonna, Like A Virgin.
THE SINGLES 81-85
October 1985, UK 6)
From Basildon to Berlin and back again - all the hits and the end of an era in Mode history, as America looms over the horizon.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Blancmange, Believe You Me, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Psychoc Candy; Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Crush.
BLACK CELEBRATION
(March 1986, UK 4 / US 90)
Impressive use of sampled sound collages, stacked vocal harmonies and symphonic arrangements characterise the Mode's most fully rounded opus to date and US breakthrough. Diversity rules, as Gahan croons like Morrissey and Gore flirts with Brechtian cabaret.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Erasure, Wonderland; The The, Infected; Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Dress For Excess.
MUSIC FOR THE MASSES
(September 1987, UK 10 / US 35)
A commercial setback in Britain but a major leap forward abroad, especially America, this slick collection of brooding pop travelogues finds the Mode on the border between cult act and mainstream phenomenon.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: INXS, Kick; U2, The Joshua Tree; The Jesus And Mary Chain, Darklands.
101
(March 1989, UK 5 / US 45)
A double-live album rounding off a decade of Mode action but these retooled hits add little to their studio blueprints. The monochrome grandeur and sly observation of the film which spawned it is lost in clinical, two-dimensional reproduction.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: U2, Rattle And Hum; New Order, Technique.
VIOLATOR
(March 1990, UK 2 / US 7)
A coming-of-age landmark and major unit shifter, this distillation of pure-pop sensibilities with propulsive motorik rhythms and dry, buoyant, disco-friendly production shows the Mode graduation to consummate albums act rather than great singles band.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Massive Attack, Blue Lines; Pet Shop Boys, Behaviour.
SONGS OF FAITH AND DEVOTION
(March 1993, UK 1 / US 1)
Another fully rounded epic, brimming with transcendent cyber-gospel and ravaged Biblical soundscapes, this widescreen experiment in soulful self-laceration lifts the Mode to a higher musical level and defies the traumatic circumstances surrounding its conception.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Nirvana, In Utero; Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral; PJ Harvey, Rid Of Me.
SONGS OF FAITH AND DEVOTION LIVE
(December 1993, UK 46) лл
Whether unorthodox experiment or festive cash-in, this live set replicated the studio album's running order but added little besides crowd noise, expanded gospel arrangements and Gahan's rock-tastic crowd banter. The tunes remain mighty, but these windy remakes are inessential.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Portishead, Dummy; New Order, Republic.
ULTRA
(April 1997, UK 1 / US 5)
Fashioned from the wreckage of Gahan's drug addiction and Wilder's departure, this strained comeback finds the Mode turning back towards Eurocentric hip-hop for inspiration. Tim Simenon's powerhouse beats and grainy textures please the ear, but the overall mood is weary and fragmented.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Prodigy, Fat Of The Land; Chemical Brothers, Dig Your Own Hole.
THE SINGLES 86-98
(1999, UK 5 / US 38) ллл
From Basildon to Hell and back again, all the hits plus the closing of another chapter in Mode history - a fine collection but as their LPs have become stronger, DM singles have declined in pure-pop punch. [4]
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Duran Duran, Greatest; Marilyn Manson, Mechanical Animals.
SPEAK & SPELL
(May 1981, UK 10)
Clipped, zippy, Fisher Price Europop with helium harmonics, hi-NRG beats and a faintly homoerotic subtext. Mellifluous ditties like 'New Life' and 'Boys Say Go' would sound comically slight by the late Eighties, but history has lent this debut an innocent charm. [3]
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Soft Cell, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret; Human League, Dare; Ultravox, Rage In Eden.
A BROKEN FRAME
(September 1982, UK 8)
Vince Clarke's upbeat pop sensibilities still linger but Martin Gore's minor chords and lyrical unease prevail. A stark, early Factory Records feel can't salvage these transitional, uncertain songs.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Duran Duran, Rio; Michael Jackson, Thriller.
CONSTRUCTION TIME AGAIN
(August 1983, UK 6) лл
The arrival of the sampler and Gore's new industrial direction combine into an anthology of totalitarian work songs and satirical observations on pop success - most notably 'Everything Counts'. Ungainly tempos still spoil the broth.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Japan, Oil On Canvas; Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams; Einsturzende Neubaten, Kollaps.
SOME GREAT REWARD
(September 1984, UK 5 / US 51) ллл
Tougher beats and metallic textures abound as Gore conceives his first subversive pop masterpiece in 'Master And Servant', 'Blasphemous Rumours' and the achingly personal piano ballad 'Somebody'. Chunky, funky, mid-Eighties production packs a satisfying punch.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Welcome To The Pleasuredome; Madonna, Like A Virgin.
THE SINGLES 81-85
October 1985, UK 6)
From Basildon to Berlin and back again - all the hits and the end of an era in Mode history, as America looms over the horizon.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Blancmange, Believe You Me, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Psychoc Candy; Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Crush.
BLACK CELEBRATION
(March 1986, UK 4 / US 90)
Impressive use of sampled sound collages, stacked vocal harmonies and symphonic arrangements characterise the Mode's most fully rounded opus to date and US breakthrough. Diversity rules, as Gahan croons like Morrissey and Gore flirts with Brechtian cabaret.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Erasure, Wonderland; The The, Infected; Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Dress For Excess.
MUSIC FOR THE MASSES
(September 1987, UK 10 / US 35)
A commercial setback in Britain but a major leap forward abroad, especially America, this slick collection of brooding pop travelogues finds the Mode on the border between cult act and mainstream phenomenon.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: INXS, Kick; U2, The Joshua Tree; The Jesus And Mary Chain, Darklands.
101
(March 1989, UK 5 / US 45)
A double-live album rounding off a decade of Mode action but these retooled hits add little to their studio blueprints. The monochrome grandeur and sly observation of the film which spawned it is lost in clinical, two-dimensional reproduction.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: U2, Rattle And Hum; New Order, Technique.
VIOLATOR
(March 1990, UK 2 / US 7)
A coming-of-age landmark and major unit shifter, this distillation of pure-pop sensibilities with propulsive motorik rhythms and dry, buoyant, disco-friendly production shows the Mode graduation to consummate albums act rather than great singles band.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Massive Attack, Blue Lines; Pet Shop Boys, Behaviour.
SONGS OF FAITH AND DEVOTION
(March 1993, UK 1 / US 1)
Another fully rounded epic, brimming with transcendent cyber-gospel and ravaged Biblical soundscapes, this widescreen experiment in soulful self-laceration lifts the Mode to a higher musical level and defies the traumatic circumstances surrounding its conception.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Nirvana, In Utero; Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral; PJ Harvey, Rid Of Me.
SONGS OF FAITH AND DEVOTION LIVE
(December 1993, UK 46) лл
Whether unorthodox experiment or festive cash-in, this live set replicated the studio album's running order but added little besides crowd noise, expanded gospel arrangements and Gahan's rock-tastic crowd banter. The tunes remain mighty, but these windy remakes are inessential.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Portishead, Dummy; New Order, Republic.
ULTRA
(April 1997, UK 1 / US 5)
Fashioned from the wreckage of Gahan's drug addiction and Wilder's departure, this strained comeback finds the Mode turning back towards Eurocentric hip-hop for inspiration. Tim Simenon's powerhouse beats and grainy textures please the ear, but the overall mood is weary and fragmented.
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Prodigy, Fat Of The Land; Chemical Brothers, Dig Your Own Hole.
THE SINGLES 86-98
(1999, UK 5 / US 38) ллл
From Basildon to Hell and back again, all the hits plus the closing of another chapter in Mode history - a fine collection but as their LPs have become stronger, DM singles have declined in pure-pop punch. [4]
CONTEMPORARY SOUNDS: Duran Duran, Greatest; Marilyn Manson, Mechanical Animals.